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Found: A Man Hiding in the Ceiling After a Break-in at a Best Buy

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Around 5:30 a.m. on Wednesday, police, tipped off by an alarm, showed up to a Best Buy in Indianapolis, Indiana, finding signs, according to WISH, of a break-in. 

About an hour later, they found the possible source of those signs: a man, hiding in the ceiling, who was subsequently arrested for breaking into the electronics store. 

Details were still pretty scarce late Wednesday morning, but other outlets reported that a K-9 unit helped cops track down the suspect, and a fire truck gave police access to the roof.

The suspect, clad in all black, was later seen being escorted away by officers in handcuffs. He was not injured.


When J. Edgar Hoover Told Some Cringeworthy Jokes Just Before He Died

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A version of this story originally appeared on Muckrock.com.

A year before he died, J. Edgar Hoover tried something he hadn’t done before in his nearly five decades as FBI director. He tried to be funny.

The American Newspaper Women’s Club was honoring Martha Mitchell, the wife of Hoover’s close friend, the Attorney General John Mitchell. Considering Hoover’s less-than-glowingopinion of the press, and that he was basically a recluse at this point in his life, it was something a coup that Hoover actually agreed to attend.

And even more, he agreed to “some remarks in a light vein.”

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Thus, for the first and last time, the world was treated to Hoover telling jokes.

Here’s Hoover’s riffing on:

His decades in an unelected position possessing nearly unchecked power …

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bad press …

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worse press …

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worst press/confirmed bachelorhood/illegible dig at a certain newspaper …

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Martha Mitchell’s infamous alcoholism (and Watergate-oversharing) …

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punishing subordinates …

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and the fundamental role the journalism plays in the preservation of democracy …

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Okay, so that last one wasn’t a joke, but considering that Hoover would have wept no bitter tears if the Washington Post burned to the ground, it’s still pretty funny.

Read the file below or read the full FBI file of J. Edgar Hoover:

The Very Hungry Caterpillar Lied to You As a Child

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Think of the best scene from your favorite children's book. Easy, right? The Very Hungry Caterpillar emerges from his cocoon, now a beautiful butterfly that takes up two whole pages. Sal and the Mama Bear run into each other in the blueberry patch. The rascally mouse gets yet another cookie.

There's a reason this particular page stuck in your mind. Maybe it surprised you, or taught you a lesson, or made you laugh. But have you ever wondered if it's accurate?

Yes, children's books are bastions of fantasy, the rightful homes of dragons and magic crayons and talking cheese. But as kids spend less time outdoors, and more time learning about nature through screens, some experts are taking a closer look at how well the lessons translate. The answer is often a resounding "Needs Improvement." And fixing up picture books—those colorful gateway drugs to further education—might be a good first step.

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Depending on who you ask, there's a lot to be done, and some scientists have been holding grudges for decades. "When I was working with an entomologist on an insect book, he said that one of his pet peeves is that the editor for Eric Carle's book about the hungry caterpillar did not vet it [with an expert]," says Donna German, General Manager at Arbordale Publishing. "He cringes to think at how many people, kids and adults, think that butterflies emerge from cocoons because of this one book." (Butterflies instead come out of chrysalises.)

Arbordale, which is explicitly focused on science and math education, works closely with scientists to check everything for accuracy. "You will not see penguins and polar bears living together in our books," German says. Some of their advisors take an even harder line—against cats in hats, talking trees, and other fun abominations. In those cases, German exerts a balancing influence. "Some scientists hate books that feature anthropomorphic characters," says German. "However, we believe that young children in particular will better relate to books if they can identify with the characters. So, yes, we publish some books where the animals 'talk' to each other."

But in this, too, they try to be clear about the line between fact and fantasy. "We follow up on all of these stories with facts and activities so that children understand where, how, when, why," says Arbordale's Public Relations manager, Heather Williams. "We pride ourselves on getting it right!"

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Not everyone does. A quick look at the current New York Times Children's Picture Books bestseller list shows that three out of the top 10 titles are about various creatures, real and imagined, interacting with very human foods—dragons and tacos, mice and brownies, and cats and cupcakes (a fourth, about a frog at a French bakery, is close behind). 

Other experts say kids' books have a trickier job than pure correctness. "Books and media have to find new ways to increase the valuation and appreciation of nature," says Juan Luis Celis-Diez, a professor of ecology at the University of Chile. Celis-Diez usually studies plant structures, but he has lately turned his attention to children's books. For a recent study, published last month in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Celis-Diez and five colleagues surveyed 1,242 Spanish-language textbooks and storybooks, each of which contained drawings or photographs of wild landscapes.

Celis-Diez and his team found some explicit mistakes, usually with animals in the wrong place—a red deer, found in the northern hemisphere, was the hero of a book about the southern rainforests, he says. But he's equally concerned about how few picture books published in Chile actually focus on Chilean animals. In the study's set, 70 percent of the textbooks and 89 percent of the storybooks examined focused on exotic animals, mostly from Africa and Europe. Children were far more likely to read about, say, lions, giraffes, and rabbits than animals or plants they might actually encounter. (This despite the fact that Chile is home to some incredibly cool species—guanacos and flamingos, anyone?)

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Studies in other countries have found a similar disconnection. One survey, done in France in 2007 and 2008, saw children much more concerned with the fates of far-away species, like pandas, than those close to home. Sometimes these animals are very exotic—in an infamous 2002 study of a group of UK schoolchildren, kids older than eight were better at identifying Pokemon than real-life local animals. Meanwhile, some surveys make it seem like the genre is giving up entirely—in 2007, the Oxford Junior Dictionarytook 30 nature-related terms out ("wren", "dandelion") and replaced them with words like "blog" and "celebrity."

This trend worries Celis-Diez. While he understands the appeal of these more famous critters, if Chilean kids don't care about their plant and animal neighbors, who will? "The systematic loss of connection and appreciation of the local environment is replaced by knowledge of more charismatic or widely distributed species," he explains. If something isn't done, he says, "this loss of local knowledge will increase with the coming generations." Kids who grow up reading only about tigers don't know to teach their own kids about the colocolo.

Katie Cunningham, Senior Editor at children's book publisher Candlewick Press, says her editorial strategy sees a way forward in balance. "We are committed to books being both windows and mirrors for children," she says. So a city kid might see their world mirrored in a book about a pining for a new bike, and expanded in a counting book about lions. "Books that validate a worldview and books that expand a worldview are equally worthy," she says. "Lucky for us, that is not a hard sell for kids." As for books about cats in hats and mice with brownies, those have their place, too. "In fiction, we suspend all kinds of disbelief in service to a larger truth," she says. "If, in pursuit of that truth, a pig must fraternize with an elephant, then so be it."

Animals will never squirm their way out of the library entirely, and children's books should always be a place for kids to stretch their imaginations, across the ocean or into the realms of impossibility. But by choosing to focus only on a smaller or displaced menagerie, we run the risk of making them ignore what's right outside—and failing to impart the knowledge that they can affect their own story.

Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com.

Predicting the Hottest Toys of the Year is Not All Fun and Games

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Ever since the insane fervor surrounding Cabbage Patch Kids in the 1980s, or the Tickle Me Elmo doll in 1996, trying to predict what the hot toy of each holiday season is going to be has become an annual ritual for consumers and reviewers alike.

But how do the prognosticators of childhood delights even go about figuring out what will become the most sought after item of the year?To find out how it’s done, we talked to editor-in-chief of The Toy Insider, Jackie Breyer, who has been reporting on the toy industry for more than 14 years. Turns out it isn’t magic or marketing, but more about how fun and educational a toy might actually be.

“We’re not just looking at what are the hot toys, we’re also looking at what are the ‘right’ toys," Breyer says. "You know, what’ll be fun, what’ll fit varying skill sets and all different kinds of kids."

Different reviewers have their own methods for choosing which toys they are going to augur for the Christmas season, but for The Toy Insider, which releases a handful of lists of the best toys of the year, there are specific criteria.

One of the first things they consider is play value, which is how much use is a toy going to get compared to how much it costs. Which isn’t to say that a toy needs to become a family heirloom to be considered. “Some one-trick-pony type of toys are a lot of fun and still worth the money for that novelty," says Breyer.

Next, they take originality into consideration. “There’s hundreds of toys out there and it’s important to give your kids unique toys to keep them busy and engaged,” says Breyer. Lots of toys mimic the play patterns of existing or older toys, but they need to bring something new to the field. That can be a twist on an existing toy, or a wholly new concept, like one of this year's hot games, Speak Out, which involves trying to speak through a mouthguard.

But it’s not all just fun and games. Breyer says that they also consider what kind of skill-building a toy can provide to a child, and this doesn't necessarily mean it has to be an outwardly educational toy. While many toys are specifically designed to simultaneously teach and entertain, a good toy, or even a game like Dungeons & Dragons, can teach subtler lessons. Role play can teach kids how to interact with people, and games that incorporate puzzles can reinforce problem solving. “Anything that contributes to a kid’s development. Maybe it teaches a lesson of some kind. Maybe it improves emotional intelligence,” says Breyer.

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There is also product integrity, which refers to whether a toy lives up to its advertised promises, and whether it’s actually a quality product. Reviewers will consider whether the materials are cheap and breakable, for instance, and whether the toy can do everything it is shown to do in its marketing. In the '90s, commercials for the board game Guess Who? showed the characters on the game cards moving and talking. In reality, they did neither. Product integrity: compromised.

Then finally, there is that ineffable “fun factor.” It might be hard to quantify, but you know a fun toy when you get your hands on one. “They need to be engaging, exciting, really just fun,” says Breyer.  “Did we laugh, or did we smile, or did we laugh while playing with it, and do we think kids will do the same?”

While all of these things are taken into consideration when looking at a year’s worth of buzzworthy toys, some might see such picks as little more than advertising for big toy companies. Breyer doesn’t deny that marketing does play a small role in their choices, “There are many toy manufacturers who have great PR and marketing teams. They make sure that we’re aware of their products,” she says. “If you’re manufacturing a product and not telling anybody about it, it’s not going to be as well known.”

The Toy Insider has already released its lists of popular toys for 2016, and they show many of the popular trends for this year. STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) toys are encouragingly popular. Specifically, toys designed to teach children computer coding seem to be taking off across the age spectrum, with one of the hottest toys of the year looking to be Fisher-Price’s Code-A-Pillar, which teaches kids aged three to six basic concepts about coding with a programmable caterpillar. Other hits include robot pets like CHiP the Robot Dog, and the Zoomer Chimp, which is a robo-monkey with realistic movement. 

But maybe this season’s true successor to the Tickle Me Elmo is a new toy known as a Hatchimal, which features a robotic baby animal breaking out of an egg. Of course, Breyer saw this coming. “We saw Hatchimals for the first time at New York Toy Fair in February this year,” she says. “As soon as we saw it, we all just looked at each other and said, ‘Whoa. Kids are going to love this.’ You just know. It’s got that wow factor.”

North Korean Officials Had No Idea What Their Hostages Were Signaling in This Photo

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The men in the photos look a little bored and awkward, maybe uncomfortable or even tense. The more you know about the photos, the more you read into them. But without context, what you see is young men assembled in rows for a formal group photo, staring into the camera or glumly off to the side. It could be a group photo of colleagues or a social club—a hum-drum setup. But stare longer and it’s obvious: In each photo, one or more of them is giving the finger.

All of these men are prisoners, pawns during a politically tense time, and they’re defying their captors in one of the only ways available to them: By flipping the bird.

It was 1968 and the United States was solidly mired in the Cold War, spying on the Soviet Union and its allies and being spied upon in return. The U.S.S. Pueblo was a Navy intelligence ship whose cover was collecting oceanographic data (of the 83 crewmen there were two civilian oceanographers aboard), but its actual duty was collecting intelligence on Russia and North Korea.

On January 23, 1968—just 18 days into its first mission—the Pueblo was approached by a North Korean vessel near the port of Wonsan. The vessel asked them their nationality, and the Pueblo hoisted the American flag. They were told to slow and prepare to be boarded; the Pueblo crew responded that they were 15.8 miles from land, and thus in international waters. But the situation quickly grew dire—three more North Korean boats appeared, and fighter jets flew overhead.

The North Korean ship opened fire on the Pueblo, killing one of the crew and wounding others. The Pueblo was barely armed; rather than fight back they began to frantically burn and dump documents, smashing equipment with axes and hammers. The ship was boarded and the crew taken captive. Bedsheets were cut up into blindfolds; they were tied up, punched, kicked, and prodded with bayonets.

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“My mother’s prediction that I would die in dirty sheets was about to come true,” wrote one crew member, Stu Russell. “And to make it worse, I had my boots on.”

Soon they were being sped toward North Korea. It was the beginning of what would be a 335-day ordeal. (The crew has written extensively about their experiences, much of it collected on a website maintained by the U.S.S. Pueblo Veterans Association.)

Upon arriving in North Korea, the Pueblo crew was marched past a hostile public to buses with covered windows that ferried them to a train, also with covered windows. The train carried them to Pyongyang, where they were displayed for the waiting press before being taken to the first of two compounds where they would live for nearly a year.

The crew dubbed their first quarters “The Barn.” There they were housed in dim, cold cells, and beaten and tortured routinely by their captors. The men grew malnourished as they ate scant meals of turnips and a foul-smelling fish they derisively called “Sewer Trout.” One man’s shrapnel wounds were treated sans anesthetic; his tonsils would also be removed without pain relief.

Russell recalled a day when he and a few other men were transported to a shed out in the woods where they were told they would take a bath. Thoughts of World War II gas chambers fresh in his mind, Russell tried to come to terms with his impending death. “I had my ticket out of Korea, I was going home,” he wrote, “I could smell the pines and actually taste the cold night air, being alive was great.” Fortunately, the men had actually been taken to a rustic bathhouse.

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As the crew suffered, cut off from outside contact, the public panicked. Washington demanded the return of the ship and its crew, North Korea rebuffed such requests, insisting the boat had been in North Korean waters. U.S. officials entreated President Lyndon B. Johnson to deploy the military, if necessary, to retrieve the men. In a television appearance days after the capture, Johnson demurred that “We shall continue to use every means available to find a prompt and a peaceful solution to the problem.” (Behind the scenes, the U.S. government was considering everything from a naval blockade to a nuclear attack.)

The public bristled, they felt the men had been abandoned. The New York Times declared the incident “humiliating” and the The San Diego Union began publishing a daily counter that ticked upward with every day the crew remained in captivity. A group of citizens calling themselves the  Remember the Pueblo Committee gave speeches, churned out bumper stickers, and tried to keep the media interested in the captives.

Meanwhile, North Korean officials were launching a media campaign of their own. They filmed and photographed the men for propaganda—even putting them through the bizarre experience of re-enacting their own capture for North Korean cameras, to be distributed as propaganda. They were forced to participate in staged press conferences, where they performed exercise routines before an audience. They were made to sign false confessions and write letters to family declaring their support for North Korea.

Occasionally, the men were the audience. One day in June, the group was assembled to watch propaganda films. One was about the North Korean soccer team’s visit to London, another about the body of a U.S. soldier being returned to officials. In both films, something extraordinary happened: Someone flipped the cameraman off. In both instances, it seemed clear that the gesture didn’t translate; their captors didn’t realize that they were being insulted, and so the action was not edited out of the reels.

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So began The Digit Affair.

“The finger became an integral part of our anti-propaganda campaign,” wrote Russell. “Any time a camera appeared, so did the fingers.”

You see it in a shot of three bored looking men, two of them casually propping their heads up by clearly extended middle fingers. In a group shot of the men seated in two rows, as if for a school photo, a man in the front looks directly into the camera, his hands folded in his lap, and his top middle finger popped out. In another, a fellow looks like he’s chewing his fingernail—on his middle finger.

If their captors ever noticed the gesture, they had a story prepared: It was a “Hawaiian Good Luck sign,” a cousin of the “Hang Loose” sign, comprised of thumb and pinky extended.

This wasn’t the only way the crew defied their captors. In fact it was just one of several methods they had for coping with their plight through jokes. The finger was part of a larger campaign that included embedding in-jokes in forced confessions and letters home, giving their captors mocking nicknames, and even a bawdy poem.

“It could be considered pretty sick humor,” said crewmember Bob Chicca in a Westword story detailing the way the Pueblo men launched a laughter offense. “It helped us survive and kept morale up. For that little period of time, we were in charge of our own lives.”

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The triumphant reign of the Hawaiian Good Luck sign came to an abrupt end when Time magazine published a photo of the men and pointed out their ruse, writing in the caption that “three of the crewmen have managed to use the medium for a message, furtively getting off the U.S. hand signal of obscene derisiveness and contempt.”

When the crew’s captors read this, they kicked off what the men would come to call “Hell Week,” beating the crewmen mercilessly for days. During this especially bleak period, the men had no way to know they were actually close to going home.

On December 23, 1968, U.S. officials finally agreed to sign a “confession” declaring that the Pueblo had trespassed in North Korean waters, although they did so only after formally stating that they didn’t believe in the statement they were signing. Satisfied, North Korea released the prisoners, who arrived back in the states on Christmas Eve.

The crew’s relief from their ordeal was brief. A weeks-long Naval inquiry was held to investigate charges that the men had surrendered without a fight and failed to destroy classified documents aboard the Pueblo. Crewmen wept during the inquiry as they testified about the abuses suffered while held captive. Finally, the navy dismissed the case. Crew members were eventually awarded medals, including 10 men who received the Purple Heart.

One thing that did not return with the crew was the U.S.S. Pueblo. It still resides in North Korea, where it’s a tourist attraction at the Victorious War Museum in Pyongyang. 

Watch a Celebration of the Cult of 'Saint Death'

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Santa Muerte is the unsanctioned folk saint of death within Mexican Catholicism. The icon has been condemned by the Catholic church as blasphemous.

Perhaps because she is one herself, Santa Muerte is considered the patron saint of outsiders. In popular culture she's been painted as the patron saint of drug traffickers and gangsters, who are drawn to her for her deathly appeal. But she has also come to be known as a representative for trans and queer individuals, as well as undocumented immigrants. 

Though Saint Death has been around for some time in Mexico and the American Southwest (some link her to the Aztec queen of the underworld Mictecacihuatl), Santa Muerte sects have sprung up wherever there are Mexican enclaves. This short documentary from AJ+ follows the celebrations of a group of Santa Muerte devotees in Queens, New York who believe that since death comes for us all, it's best to be on her side when she does.

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.

The Smugglers Who Hid Booze in the Home of Saudi Arabia's Top Religious Official

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In Saudi Arabia, Islamic law is sternly enforced—which means, of course, that alcohol is strictly forbidden. But as with any forbidden substance anywhere in the world, that means little behind closed doors, where alcohol flows freely for those willing and able to pay. And like any country (or state) where popular substances are illegal, Saudi Arabia teems with dealers and smugglers profiting from low availability and high demand.

But in a land where even the consumption of alcohol is punishable by prison sentences and the humiliation of public floggings, where do you store your stockpiles of bootlegged liquor away from the prying eyes of the religious and legal authorities?

Why not right under their noses?

According to a letter sent by Sir Willie Morris, the British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia in 1970, this is exactly what one gang of entrepreneurial alcohol smugglers attempted to do.

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Muhammad ibn Ibrahim was the first Grand Mufti of modern Saudi Arabia. This meant he was the state’s highest legal and religious authority tasked with issuing opinions (fatwas) on any and all legal and social issues, including the consumption of alcohol and other banned substances.

A descendent of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab—the 18th-century religious scholar who helped provide the framework for the modern Saudi state—Muhammad ibn Ibrahim was far from a popular man when he died in 1969 at the age of 80, according to Morris’ letter. This was partly due to his conservative religious rulings but also due to rumored abuses of power, which included lobbying the King to lift restrictions on rent so he could make more profit on his “considerable properties.”

“Perhaps he was not so bad as his reputation but he was certainly bigoted, reactionary and mean,” Morris wrote after ibn Ibrahim’s death. “I doubt whether many people here were remembering him in their prayers.”

They weren’t remembering him in their toasts, either. Shortly after the Grand Mufti’s death, Riyadh suffered a severe shortage of bootleg liquor, and—as any casual student of economics could predict—the cost shot through the roof. The price of a case of whiskey reportedly doubled, from 700 Saudi Riyals to 1500 (approximately $400 to $2,500, adjusted for inflation). Even at that price, Morris adds, “it was almost unobtainable.”

The two events were not unrelated. According to a top Jeddah-based merchant cited in Morris’ letter, one gang of alcohol smugglers had been using the Grand Mufti’s home to store their product, reasoning that Muhammad ibn Ibrahim, having gone blind in his old age, wouldn’t know what the boxes contained even if he were to stumble upon them.

And who would think to look for bootlegged alcohol in the home of the most important religious figure in the country anyway, the man responsible for upholding the nation’s Islamic laws and principles?

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Their plans hit a wall when ibn Ibrahim died. His house was sealed while the property was listed for the purpose of proving his will and, along with the Grand Mufti’s personal items, 180 cases of liquor were trapped inside “whilst,” Morris wrote, “the owners sweat and Muslims and non-Muslims alike go thirsty in a dry land.”

It’s difficult to confirm any details about this opportunistic group of bootleggers – or if the story was ever anything more than rumors and urban legend. But throughout Saudi Arabia’s modern history, tales have circulated of the different ways people have found to get around the country’s strict anti-drinking laws.

Beginning in 2015, Saudi customs officials began taking to social media to publicize some of the failed, albeit highly creative, attempts of alcohol smugglers. One man was found to have taped 14 bottles of liquor to his legs, hidden beneath his free-flowing thawb (a traditional form of loose, white robe worn by men throughout the Arabian Gulf) in an attempt to smuggle the bottles over the King Fahd Causeway that connects Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

In another more creative, albeit ultimately failed, attempt, smugglers individually wrapped 48,000 cans of Heineken in fake Pepsi labels to try and pass the beer off as harmless soft drinks. They were foiled by shoddy workmanship (the labels easily peeled) and an eye for detail among the customs officials. 

From the twitter account of Saudi Arabia's customs department, an attempt to smuggle in beer by disguising it as Pepsi. 

An attempt to smuggle Johnny Walker Red Label. 

Due to the high risk involved and the difficulty of moving product in high numbers, name-brand liquor comes at a cost. One diplomatic cable from 2009 released by Wikileaks put the price of a black-market bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label at $800 due to a shortage in supply. (In the United States, the whiskey would cost from $40 to $50). It’s no wonder many in the country resort to brewing their own.

As in Prohibition-era United States, this has led to the rise of modern-day speakeasies—especially behind the walls of the expatriate enclaves, where authorities mostly turn a blind-eye to illicit activity. Unlike the Prohibition-era U.S., though, which brings to mind celebrity mafiosi and blood-drenched streets, there is little evidence of high-level gangsters in Saudi Arabia operating complex networks of suppliers, smugglers, and dealers, infiltrating the police and border agency at their highest levels, or settling business differences with irrefusable offers.

At the turn of the millennium, however, things did turn briefly violent between rival factions of Saudi alcohol providers, at least according to some.

Four bombings carried out over three months in the country were linked to expatriates who, according to Saudi authorities, used radio-controlled bombs to target the cars of their competition. One British man, Christopher Rodway, died and five others were injured in the attacks. Five British expatriates, a Canadian, and a Belgian were deemed responsible and confessed to the crimes on national television. Abel al-Jubeir, the foreign affairs adviser to the Crown Prince, claimed the attackers and victims were members of “rival gangs who were involved in smuggling alcohol,” who had turned to violence to settle scores.

The accused deny the charges and have since been released. Many observers believe they were forced to confess to hide the reality: that the bombings were carried out by anti-Western extremists who were opposed to Saudi ties to the U.K. and U.S.

As for the gang behind the Grand Mufti’s stash, nobody can be sure what happened to them or their stockpile. Muhammad ibn Ibrahim’s family continues to occupy the most important religious and legal seat in the country and smugglers and bootleggers are finding new ways to to quench the thirst of the Saudi desert, each more ingenious than the last. But with the exception of the rum-runners and authorities involved, it’s hard to know if this particular tale is anything more than an urban legend.

Still, as Morris wrote: “In this country, the story could be true; it certainly should be.”

Rare, Giant Shark Attacks Seal in Oregon River

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Crabbers near Astoria, Oregon recently caught footage of what appears to be a Pacific Northwest reboot of Jaws. As seen in a video shared by Oregon’s NBC affiliate KGW, a huge shark has found its way into the Columbia River to hunt down some seal meals.

The video was captured by a pair of local crab fishermen who were out on a standard crustacean hunt. When they were on the water in a small boat, the fishermen noticed a large pool of blood in the water, coming from an injured seal. While they tried to figure out what had attacked the seal, the fin and tail of a massive shark—which they assumed was a great white—erupted above the surface of the water. Judging by the bleeps in the video, the shark gave the guys in the boat a pretty good scare.

The witnesses judged the shark to be around 12-15 feet long, which would make it an average-sized great white specimen, although local wildlife experts quoted by KGW have other theories. According to a biologist from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife who took a look at the video, the shark could also be a salmon shark, a close relative of the great white. Both types of shark haunt the area’s coastal regions, but it's rarer to see them travel up into the river.

Whatever type of shark it was, it was large, and appeared hungry. Swimming season is thankfully over, but it’s a good reminder to stay out of the water anyway.


No One Seems to Know Why This Plane Kept Circling Denver

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A local news organization in Denver is reporting that a white plane spent Wednesday morning circling the Denver metro area multiple times with no apparent explanation.

Denver7 called a laundry list of government agencies and couldn’t get a clear answer on what the plane was doing: “Still so far the only answer we’ve got is: I don’t know,” the news channel reported.

The plane, which had a callsign of IRON99, came from California, circled over Denver in an oval shaped like a racetrack several times, then continued on towards Oklahoma.

Denver7 wasn’t able to find out exactly who was responsible for the flight, but it’s pretty clear that the mystery plane was connected to the military. Aviation enthusiasts confidentlyidentified it as an E-6B, an airborne command post aircraft used by the Navy and Air Force.

That doesn’t explain why the plane was making this particular maneuver at this particular moment, and why the military wouldn’t just tell news reporters what was happening. Anytime you start talking about planes and Denver, suspicions of weirdness are immediately high. But it’s probably nothing to get worked up about. For now.

The Bizarre 17th-Century Dioramas Made from Real Human Body Parts

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In 1689, on the canal Bloemgracht in Amsterdam there was a museum that showcased preserved anatomical specimens in a peculiar manner.

Among jars of embalmed specimens, there were several startling dioramas containing skeletons of infants adorned with delicate and morbid decor. In one of the pieces, depicted below, five skeletons are carefully positioned on a vase foundation made of inflated tissues from human testes. There was a feather headdress, a girdle of sheep intestines, and a spear made of the hardened vas deferens of an adult man.

The skeleton standing at the top of the pile of preserved human remains holds a piece of bone like a violin and a dried artery for a bow. Its head tilted towards the heavens is coupled with the inscription, “Ah Fate, ah Bitter Fate!”

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The skeletal scene is from one of Dutch anatomist Frederik Ruysch’s several dioramas, or tableaux—fetal skeletons arranged in still-life positions atop a landscape of preserved plants, bones, and embalmed tissues. Ruysch’s Amsterdam museum was like a 17th-century version of the recent blockbuster exhibition, Body Worlds, by Gunther von Hagen. He treated science as an art, pushing the practice of specimen preservation while arranging his pieces to make a commentary on the beauty of life and death.

He would juxtapose the macabre contents with flowers, beads, jewels, and lace to “allay the distaste of people who are naturally inclined to be dismayed by the sight of corpses,” he once wrote. “I do it to preserve the honor and dignity of the soul once housed in the body,” Ruysch said.

Ruysch’s displays attracted medical professionals, political leaders, and the general public, receiving mixed reactions of fascination and disgust. In addition to his collection, Ruysch used notable preservation techniques, such as wax injections, to maintain the structure of blood vessels, and created a secret embalming liquor that kept specimens looking lifelike.

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While he is most famous for his hauntingly beautiful dioramas, his museum also contained quality preserved specimens ranging from exotic plants, squid, and butterflies, to human embryos and brains, which were later drawn in his book Thesaurus anatomicus— or "anatomical treasures."   

Born in 1638 in The Hague, Netherlands, Ruysch grew up exposed to foreign flora and fauna that travelers would bring back to Europe to trade. He first became interested in plants and received training at an apothecary, which led him to start collecting different plants, rocks, insects, and eventually human bones. Ruysch later became a fellow at the Amsterdam Surgeon’s Guild in Anatomy, and by 1690, he was regularly dissecting, embalming, and mounting preparations.

In the late 1600s, Ruysch decided to share his anatomical works with the public, renting out a series of small houses in Amsterdam for the museum. His collection continued to grow, “and so I was forced to start a second room, and this one also being insufficient, a third,” he said.

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The museum was overflowing with more than 2,000 specimens. While the anatomical collection was the centerpiece, he had two separate rooms dedicated to dried plants and “strange creatures” filled with fish, insects, and other flora and fauna from Asia, Africa, and America. When visitors entered, they were immediately greeted by a tomb of various skeletal remains—bones of children who died too young. One skull of a newborn baby bore the saying: "No head, however strong, escapes cruel death."

“Ruysch’s presentation of his anatomical collection was in keeping with a tradition in which depictions of skulls and skeletons served as reminders of death,” Luuc Kooijmans writes in the book Death Defied: The Anatomy Lessons of Frederik Ruysch.“He impressed upon his visitors that death could strike at any moment, and that they should be ready to face it with a clear conscience.”  

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Ruysch ran the museum as a family operation. He would hold classes and provide information to physicians and medical professionals himself, while his daughters would give tours to the general public, who paid a small admission fee. One of his daughters, still-life artist Rachel Ruysch, even assisted with the dioramas by sewing the lace garments and tiny batiste sleeves.

Some fetal heads were given lace collars, and the blunt ends of embalmed limbs wore textiles and fabrics, writes Britta Martinez in the Embryo Project Encyclopedia. Many of the skeletons are seen holdings jewels in their boney hands or strings of pearls. Ruysch also took to decorating the lids of preservation jars—a floating human hand cradling a hatching reptile topped with seashells, dried corals, butterflies, and flowers. By mixing exquisite plant arrangements with the human specimens, Ruysch hoped to soften the sight of morbid body parts for those who found it grotesque and unsettling.

The decorations “put the horror in perspective by stressing the transience of life, by showing that the body was no more than an earthly frame for the soul,” Kooijmans explains.

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However, his designs were met with some criticism. In a pamphlet published in 1677, one opponent ridiculed Ruysch’s artistic dioramas, and claimed that he couldn’t see how the displays could inform anything about anatomy:

“He paints snakes to portray his venom; he paints toads to express his poisoned nature...he paints lobsters to portray his crabbiness… he paints trees and woods to chase the officers into them; he paints flowers to learn that all his fine works perish as easily as a wildflower.”

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Ruysch’s contribution to anatomy is often overshadowed by his elaborate tableaux. He spent much of his time experimenting with embalming methods that would better preserve soft body parts, which lose their color and quality over time. One technique he helped refine was the art of preserving the tiny veins, arteries, lymph vessels, and nerves that run throughout the body.

In 1697, he successfully injected a wax-like fluid that was thin enough to seep into the smallest branching capillaries. The fluid would then solidify, preserving the shape and structure.

“All those arterial vessels fanning out into the internal organs and going straight into the veins,” Ruysch marveled.  

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This technique would be performed on deceased humans and animals to better visualize vessels and blood flow. Ruysch applied the injection on the cerebral cortex, which helped others understand its structure, writes Sidney Ochs in A History of Nerve Functions: From Animal Spirits to Molecular Mechanisms.

Physicians also praised Ruysch for the lifelike color and elasticity of his specimens. He achieved this greater quality through another liquid invention he called “liquor balsamicum,” a clear embalming liquid that took him 34 years to perfect. It made the specimens “as hard as stone and imperishable, but changed them a great deal in color and shape,” Ruysch wrote.  

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Ruysch never divulged the recipe of liquor balsamicum. After his death in 1731, at the age of 92, various chemists attempted to reproduce it but the results were unimpressive. In a book published in 2006, his secret liquor balsamicum has been revealed to contain clotted pig’s blood, Berlin blue, and mercury oxide, according to Erich Brenner in the Journal of Anatomy. 

In 1717, Ruysch sold his anatomy museum (and secret liquor recipe) to Tsar Peter the Great, who had been an avid patron and fan of his work. His pieces still exist in the Kunstkammer of Peter the Great in Leningrad Academy of Science, and are immortalized in the illustrations of Thesaurus anatomicus.

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Ruysch’s fetal tableaux are bizarre, but he believed that they served a scientific purpose, writes Antonie Luyendijk-Elshout. Ruysch firmly stated that he could bring a dead person back to life through his embalming practices, as if “almost nothing is missing but the soul.”

Watch and be Hypnotized by the Flow of Moving Paint

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Memories of Paintings from Thomas Blanchard on Vimeo.

We know what you’re thinking: “four and a half minutes of paint moving?” but trust us, once you start watching, you'll stop noticing the passage of time.

This video, directed by Thomas Blanchard, is a symphony of colors. Titled Memories of Paint, it holds you in a trance as the slow motions of the substance rock back and forth, forming shapes that evoke arctic landscapes or star clusters.

The project was inspired by the work of Russian artist Rus Khasanov, and uses paint, oil, oat milk, and soap liquid to achieve its hypnotizing effect.

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.

The Wildly Popular Colombian Soap Opera Even the Government Stopped to Watch

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If you were to walk the streets of Bogotá at 8:00pm in 1994, you would have been confronted by a strange sight. The city, which at most other times is a constant bustle of traffic jams, street vendors, buses, and pedestrians, would be relatively quiet, almost at a standstill. Foreigners might be confused, but locals knew the reason, most likely because they were partaking in it themselves. The cause? A soap opera called Café, con aroma de mujer (Coffee, With the Scent of a Woman). 

Now, soap operas in Latin America come and go. Some achieve wild success, some get lost in the jumble of television channels that constantly churn out novelas like very well-oiled machines. Few, however, have ever reached the status of Café, as Colombians affectionately refer to it. The soap is the second most-watched program in the country, right behind Ugly Betty, which in 2010 was declared by the Guinness Book of World Records as the most successful soap opera of all time (both soap operas were written by the now-acclaimed Fernando Gaitan).

Given its success, it is strange to think that the premise of Café is fairly simple, and somewhat predictable: A poor young woman nicknamed Gaviota travels around looking for work at coffee plantations. At one such plantation, she meets Sebastian, the rich and handsome heir of a well-to-do family. Of course, they fall madly in love. Villains, misunderstandings, and tragedies separate them, but in the end (spoiler alert) their love wins and they get married.  

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Such a premise has been endlessly repeated in soap operas. Yet this time, the story didn’t just enjoy popularity, it quite literally changed the daily life of Colombians. As Alejandro Jose Lopez Caceres explains in his book, Between the Pen and the Screen: Reflections on Literature, Film, and Journalism:

The streets and avenues of the main cities of the country turned ghostly at 8 p.m., the time of emission, for a moment,  in the halls of the Senate, the arguments weren’t between liberals vs. conservatives, but between supporters of Dr. Salinas vs. supporters of Sebastian; the President gave his opinion on what the best ending was for Gaviota; congressional sessions ended sooner and several debates had to be put off until morning [...] the same happened in bars, in neighborhoods, in universities, in brothels.”

In their daily lives, people took the same approach as congress seemed to have taken: whatever it was, it could wait until after Café. Or, as Cristobal Errazuriz, who played the story’s main villain, explained in a TV special dedicated to the soap:

You couldn’t call any house after 8 p.m. because they would insult you. “Ah, we’re watching Café!” It was a phenomenon, they played it on the buses. While it was being aired, the buses would play its audio, so that the people who couldn’t get home could listen to it while on the bus.

Those on cars and motorcycles would often carry a portable TV with them, so they could watch it while driving home. Hang outs, appointments, and other rendezvous had to be scheduled around the sacred time.

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If Café’s importance continues to be doubted, one need only look at this entry in one Colombian history textbook's chronology: 

1993: The soap opera Coffee, With the Scent of a Woman is aired. Law 100 established universal social security. Pablo Escobar dies in Medellin at the hands of the police.

Café, in other words, ranks alongside universal social security, and the death of Colombia’s most feared terrorist and drug kingpin. 

But why would an entire country forego policy making, meetings with friends, and road safety for a soap opera with a seemingly unoriginal plot? The answer, or part of it, lies in the title.

Coffee has been one of Colombia’s main exports since the beginning of the 20th century. It is a source of livelihood for many, and a source of pride for all. In the beginning of the 1990s, coffee was a especially sensitive topic. The country’s golden era of exportation had been abruptly cut short with the end of the International Coffee Pact in 1989. With new competition and unregulated prices, the product’s value was no longer stable, and Colombia suffered because of it.

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This suffering was monetary, of course, but also moral. Colombia’s coffee-growing axis is in many ways its heartland, and coffee is one of the products that the country is proud of exporting. In the mists of the armed conflict and the height of cartel problems, this was even truer. As Lopez Caceres references when talking about Café,

In several countries around the world, in Latin America as well as in Europe, for many months the name of Colombia was not associated with cocaine but with Coffee, With the Scent of a Woman.

A 1995 article in El Tiempo claims that the success of the soap opera “resides in its being a faithful reflection of contemporary Colombian life.” Its depiction of life both in the coffee region and the capital, of corruption, of the realities of class divisions in the only country in the world that quantifies social class, and, according to the article, of the constantly frustrated dreams of a better life, brought it close to the hearts of Colombian. By following the strong-willed Gaviota's struggle through the corruption and classism of an industry so intrinsically tied to the national identity, the entire country saw itself represented on screen. 

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At the same time, as Marco Palacios and Frank Safford say in Colombia: Fragmented Country, Divided Society, the script “suppressed the devastation of extortion, rampant crime, and kidnapping to which Colombian families have been exposed.” 

The soap opera, in other words, had the ability to both bring Colombians closer to the center of their reality, while simultaneously letting them escape from it. 

Take a Peek at the Haunting Sounds and Sights of an After-Dark Cemetery Party

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For the past four years, Atlas Obscura and Green-Wood Cemetery have teamed up each fall to present Into the Veil, a nighttime soiree in which 1,500 guests are invited to explore the Victorian-era garden cemetery's expansive grounds and ornate mausoleums by the light of the moon. 

Attendees are given maps upon arrival and encouraged to venture into the night, choosing their own paths through the grounds to discover a series of atmospheric performances and installations. One of this year's high points was a surprise set by the legendary Sun Ra Arkestra within the cemetery catacombs—the intergalactic-inspired set saw the audience joyously agreeing that "space is the place." Addison Post and P. Nick Curran of Loroto Productions captured the ambiance beautifully in the above video.

If you missed out this year, stay informed about future Atlas Obscura events by joining our New York and Philadelphia mailing lists. Next fall's Into the Veil event will be taking place at both Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn and at Philadelphia's historic Laurel Hill.

Looking Inside the Abandoned Schools of the Irish Countryside

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On most weekends for the past year I have been visiting abandoned elementary schools in rural Ireland. Due to a long-term tradition of emigration, and changing demographics, there are a surprising number of derelict school houses scattered around the Irish countryside. I have no real explanation for why I began doing this; it began by accident while undertaking some field work during my nine-to-five as an archaeologist. I don’t think it’s become an obsession, but I have visited almost 150 abandoned school houses in the past 12 months.

I guess the big question is why? Contemporary ruins can provoke an unusual emotional response that is difficult to define. A familiar environment that has fallen into decay can be both unsettling and intriguing, inspiring fascination and fear as a tangible reminder of the scale of your own lifetime.

But in the school houses I visit, it is the bizarre and sometimes false sense of nostalgia that is most striking; how my concept of time is warped as I am surrounded by a familiar man-made environment that is being quickly reclaimed by the earth. In a sense, I am not just exploring a physical landscape, but a cognitive landscape where my memory of these places as everlasting is now clearly wrong.

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Memory is dynamic and fluid—a pulsing living thing. It can be continually stretched, coveted, erased and manipulated by the environment and circumstances from which it is recalled; taking on greater or lesser significance that is determined by the interpretation of those who recollect in the present. And nostalgia is even trickier still; a wistful desire in thought or in fact, for a former time in one’s life. In Portuguese, the word Saudaderepresents this feeling; an emotional state of longing for an absent something—"the love that remains."

It can be argued that few things have greater impact on our development and personality, our understanding of the world around us and how to interpret it, than our experience of the classroom and schoolyard. With this in mind, consider how much of an impact these now rotting buildings may have had on the lives of many.

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Ballymackeehola County Mayo, 1895

This rural two-roomed national school is situated in the sparsely populated and boggy townland of Ballymackeehola in north-west Mayo. With little tree cover, the area is often wind-swept, with the Atlantic Ocean sometimes bringing a damp and harsh gale. The plaque above the doorway dates the construction of the school to 1895. It remained in use until 1969.

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Whiddy Island National School County Cork, 1887

Whiddy Island is a small, near-shore island located at the head of Bantry Bay in Co. Cork. Not far from the modern quayside and in the townland of Trawnahaha is a small late 19th-century one-roomed school house overlooking Bantry Bay below. Painted bright blue with a white lime-wash, in recent years the building had been used as a local museum though it has now fallen into a state of disrepair.

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Gortahose County Leitrim, 1890

In 1937 the Irish Folklore Commission, in collaboration with the Department of Education and the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation, initiated a revolutionary scheme in which schoolchildren were encouraged to collect and document folklore and local history. Over a period of eighteen months some 100,000 children in 5,000 primary schools in the twenty-six counties of the Irish Free State were encouraged to collect folklore material in their home districts. This of course included Gortahose. Below are extracts from the Irish Folklore Commission’s records for Gortahose. The story’s featured below relate to local folklore and places, with an interesting reference to witchcraft in the locality.

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Latton National School County Monaghan, 1941

Now standing in open pasture, the structure is gradually giving way to the elements. To the front of the building there is an inscribed limestone date and name plaque reading "Scoil Mhuire Leacht Fhinn Scoil Náisiúnta 1941". Inside, many of the fixtures and fittings remain, and each classroom retains much of the original furniture, giving the environment a particularly spooky feeling.

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Drumlish National School County Longford, 1930

Standing beside the building is a pebble-dashed water-tower typical of 1950s school construction, while to the rear is a cast-in-situ concrete playground shelter. It is a particularly evocative abandoned schoolhouse, only going out of use in recent years. The sight of the functional 1950s structure amid the encroaching nature gives the interior a Pripyat-esque feel.

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Killymarly National School, County Monaghan, 1840

Two-storey National Schools are less common in Ireland, and generally earlier in date than their single-storey counterparts.  Remarkably, one of the classrooms retains three long school benches, two of which are in relatively good condition. Facing a now-blank wall, it is interesting to wonder how many local school children sat on these seats through the years, and to which corners of the earth they might have scattered. And when was the last time the empty inkwells that are sunken into each desk held ink?

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Bunnadden, County Sligo 1883

A plaque on the northern end of the building dates its construction to 1883, although the First Edition Ordnance Survey sheet above shows there was a pre-existing school at this site by the 1840s. Although in ruins, the interior is relatively well preserved, with the brightly painted walls displaying a spooky patina.

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Carrigan National School, County Cavan, 1897

The building includes the typical double entrances at each end for boys and girls, with the schoolyard to the rear also being segregated. A Stone plaque out front is inscribed ‘CARRIGANS NATIONAL SCHOOL / 1897 / ENLARGED BY REV T. MAGUIRE CC / 1929’. 

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Shanavaghera, County Mayo, 1935

The building is certainly in a ruinous state, with nature making its way in through the shattered glass and broken doorways. Nonetheless, original features such as the wooden partition that divided the main room into three classrooms, three original fireplaces, and a single school desk added wonderful atmosphere to this building. The separate entrances for boys and girls are to the rear of the school, and the numbered coat-hooks once used by the pupils can be seen in the entrance hall. The suspended wooden floor remains solid enough to walk on without fear of it collapsing beneath your feet. The school closed in 1968 or 1969.

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Mastergeehy, County Kerry, 1870-1890

It is difficult to imagine the tranquility of this location being disturbed by the outside world, but this was the case one winter in 1941. On the 26th of December, a Luftwaffe Junkers Ju 88 D was forced to crash-land on the valley floor because of engine trouble. Such happenings were undoubtedly the subject of much discussion when the school children of Mastergeehy returned to their tiny classroom after the Christmas break in 1942. Is there anyone still living in the area that remembers the time when the winds that have given Mastergeehy its name, brought this unexpected surprise?

How Alchemy Has Been Depicted in Art Through the Ages

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In the 1738 edition of Physica subterranea, written by German alchemist Johann Becher, there is a particularly intriguing illustration. Titled The Body as an Alchemical Laboratory, it depicts a figure framed by drapes and surrounded by floating symbols. To an untrained eye, these symbols are indecipherable. But for those that studied alchemy—primarily known for attempting to turn base metals into gold—they codify formulas, elements, planetary metals and ingredients. 

Some of the symbols shown relate to Venus (linked to copper), Mercury (linked to quicksilver), along with “primary catalysts” like sulfur. Their design is almost mystical, akin to the hidden codes of a secret order. It’s a fascinating example of how alchemy has been depicted over the centuries, which is the subject of the new Getty Research Institute exhibition, The Art of Alchemy.

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But there was more to alchemy than trying to create gold. It encompassed elements of chemistry, and also had the loftier aim of extending life. Or, as David Brafman, the curator of the exhibition puts it, “alchemy was a science tinged with spirituality and infused with a spritz of artistic spirit.”

The exhibition explores alchemy as depicted in art and rare books, across Europe and Asia, from the 3rd century B.C. to the 20th. It includes the 20-foot-long Ripley Scroll, an 18th century artwork that shows two alchemists sharing secrets from a locked book.

Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from the exhibition, which runs through February 12, 2017. 

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Why Did Ancient Italians Bury Thousands of Clay Body Parts?

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Perhaps the most impressive thing about the anatomical votives of Central Italy are the sheer numbers in which they were found.

One site contained 1,654 votive feet, made of terracotta. Another had more than 400 terracotta wombs. At Ponte di Nona, there were 8,395 votives recovered in the 1970s—of the 6,171 that were identifiable body parts, 985 were heads, about as many were eyes, and 2,368 were feet. Overall, at about 150 sites, archaeologists have uncovered tens of thousands of feet, legs, arms, hands, heads, eyes, ears, breasts, uteri, vulvae, phalluses, and sometimes whole midriff sections, with indistinct organs exposed.

Scholars of ancient Italy have known about these devotional offerings for decades now, but they're still wondering: why exactly did people leave these votives for the gods?

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Anatomical votives of this sort have also been found in Greece, but they were most popular in one specific place, during one specific time—on the western coast of Central Italy, from about the 4th century B.C. to the 1st century B.C. Most of the tens of thousands of surviving votives that archaeologists have found were left in pits, often containing thousands of body parts. Rebecca Flemming, a British scholar who writes about the votives in a new book, calls these "organized clear-outs of the votive clutter"—respectful burials of past offerings meant to clear temple space for new ones.

Before they were buried, these votives would have crowded the walls, ceilings and floors of temples—they're designed for display. Many of them have holes that could have been used to hang them on a hook or looped through with some sort of line to suspend from a wall or ceiling. Others had pedestals or were made so they could lean against a wall. Many of the votives were somewhat standardized and made from molds, although they also varied in size and design. It's also likely that visitors left anatomical votives made of materials other than clay; terracotta just happens to be a material with a long shelf life.

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It's clear that these anatomical votives were connected in some way with health and well-being, but for years scholars have debated exactly who used them and how. Once it was thought that the votives were primarily used by rural people, but Flemming argues that it was a "wide-spread, accessible, and inclusive," popular inside cities and far out into the countryside, and available both to elites and lower classes.

Some scholars believe that the votives reflects pleas for the healing of particular body parts or were thank-you gifts for prayers answered. Some shrines may have specialized in particular illnesses—at least that's one explanation for why one place might have a great concentration of hands, another a great concentration of eyes, and another a great concentration of uteri.

It's an easy leap to make when a temple to a goddess connected to fertility is full of terracotta wombs. At one site, when the wombs were X-rayed, they were found to have small spheres inside, apparently representing embryos—either wishes fulfilled or requests for the future.

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But some scholars think these anatomical votives shouldn't be taken quite so literally. Feet votives could be connected to travel, for instance; eyes and ears could represent something more conceptual than eye and ear pain. Did heads represent headaches—or the whole persons? Or perhaps a soul sickness rather than a simple physical pain?

Part of the mystery comes from the lack of written sources that explain exactly what was going on here. The practice faded as social and political conditions in the area changed: people began concentrating more in cities, and written votives became more popular.

Indeed, scholars still have plenty to argue about: a new book is coming out in 2017 that's dedicated to "new questions about what constitutes an anatomical votive" and "how they were used and manipulated."

There will probably always be questions, though, about these mass burials of clay body parts.

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Found, Possibly: Hidden Tunnels That Were Escape Routes From Gay Bars in San Francisco

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In San Francisco, a development project is being planned on a site that was once home to some of the city’s most famous gay bars. The development could be blocked though, by the discovery of a network of underground tunnels used by bar patrons to escape police raids, SFist reports.

The only catch is that it’s not clear who’s actually seen these secret tunnels.

The development would put a hotel and condos at 950 Market Street, on a block once considered part of the “Meat Rack,” a nightlife district for gay men and trans people. One of the most famous, the Old Crow, survived here from 1935—and perhaps even earlier, as a speakeasy—through the 1980s. In those earlier years, from the 1930s to the 1950s, police would regularly raid and shutter bars associated with gay nightlife.

As the development project nears its final approvals, preservation activist Nate Allbee turned up photos of underground tunnels that connected the bars in this area and would have allowed patrons to escape those raids, SFist reports.

The photos show spacious basements, dusty stairwells and vintage liquor bottles.  So many gay bars faced raids and were shut down in the 1930's, 40's, and 50's, and it's never been clear how places like the Old Crow managed to stay in business so long. The tunnels may be the answer,” Allbee told SFist.

But another local news outlet, KPIX5, was unable to locate the tunnels. The CBS affiliate reported that Allbee did not take the photos himself and wouldn’t say who provided them. The development group told KPIX5 that “This is the first time we’ve heard that there is a tunnel…As far as we’re concerned, there is no tunnel.”

This Artist Used Over 6,500 Scents To Recreate The Smell Of 35 World Cities

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 “Every capital city has its own smell. London smells of fried fish and Player's, Paris of coffee, onions and Caporals, Moscow of cheap eau-de-Cologne and sweat. Berlin smells of cigars and boiled cabbage.” This observation comes from the 1963 travelogue Thrilling Cities by the British author Ian Fleming—and, at least when it comes to Berlin, it’s rather outdated. Today, more than five decades after James Bond’s creator took his nose for a trip around the world, the ever-changing German capital seems to be smelling like doner kebabs and currywurst more than anything else. But for Berlin-based olfactory artist Sissel Tolaas, who creates “smellscapes” of major cities, it smells like so much more.

“Every city has an identity like we humans do. And every city is unique smell-wise,” explains Tolaas, a half-Norwegian, half-Icelandic expatriate artist with background in chemistry, linguistics, mathematics, and visual arts. “The odor depends on things like climate, geography, demography etc. Inside the city, smells differs from neighborhood to neighborhood. For example if you go to Berlin’s Neukölln neighborhood, you’ll notice it’s quite different from, let’s say, Charlottenburg when it comes to smell.” 

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To Tolaas, the ethnically diverse Neukölln, which she studied back in 2004, smells like heaven. “Its smell is very complex because of the many foods and spices,” she says. “There are many body odors as well. And dry cleaners. Most of them are in the basement, so when it’s hot the smell comes up and you can almost see the white shirts coming out, flying towards you.”

Tolaas, an energetic, fast talking blonde with a platinum-blonde bob that makes her look like the Australian singer Sia, knows what she’s talking about. She is one of the most respected olfaction experts in the world and has turned collecting, dissecting, and engineering smells into a life mission.

The artist has been working in the medium of smell for more than 20 years, and has amassed a personal smell library of more than 6,500 odors caught in airtight cans. She’s taken her interest in odors to new heights by making Limburger cheese from bacteria found in David Beckham's shoes—cheese that was then served to the VIPs at the London Olympics. She also managed to recreate the long lost smell of the First World War for the German Military History Museum in Dresden. But nowadays Tolaas is traveling around the world and mapping its cities, one smell at a time. The project, called SmellScapes, has taken her to 35 cities so far, from London and Paris to Cape Town to Kansas City (both of them).

Tolaas started working on her SmellScapes more than a decade ago. Most of them are commissioned by either creative platforms, city councils, or universities and private foundations, and they serve an amazingly wide variety of purposes. For example, her SmellScape of Mexico City, developed in 2001 in collaboration with the Harvard graduate student teacher program, was a creative way to understand pollution.

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“The pollution in Mexico City is a big problem,” explains Tolaas. “Back then it was the most polluted human settlement in the world. It was worse than Beijing! This was primarily because the city is high up, it’s situated in a valley surrounded by mountains and it’s flanked by two volcanoes. And it has a lot of car traffic. So, we developed new tools of awareness to understand this problem beyond the way it looks visually.”

While working on the SmellScape of Mexico City, Tolaas visited more than 200 neighborhoods over and over again, trying to identify what makes them smell the way they do. The research resulted in an exhibition called Talking Nose, in which Tolaas created a scratch-and-sniff map of the Mexican capital and videotaped 2,100 of its residents while they described the way the city smells.

“People are tired of looking at melting icebergs and polar bears. Those things became kind of cliche nowadays,” Tolaas says. “Instead of that, I walked around and catched in a playful manner the smells in different neighborhoods. The goal was reproducing the smell of pollution—the car exhaust, the refrigerator, the air conditioner… Then I gave the smells to people and asked them to articulate them which made them understand better what’s causing the pollution.”

Tolaas’ latest SmellScape project is focused on the olfactory identity of Singapore. She carried out fieldwork in selected neighborhoods that have been developed by the architect William S. W. Lim and presented her findings in the ongoing exhibition Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts of Critical Spatial Practice.

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But how do one even collect and preserve something so ephemeral as a smell?

“The first tool I use is my nose,” says Tolaas, perhaps rather obviously. “I have to make sure that a certain smell is permanent by going back in different times of the day and the year. In other words the smell should be part of the identity of the site. Then if I’m able to collect the source of the smell, I would bring it to the lab. If the source is, let’s say, a sewage plant and I can’t collect it, I’d go back with a special tool that collect smells molecules from the source and I’ll take a ‘snapshot’ of that smell.”

The “smell camera” Tolaas uses is based on a technology called Headspace. It was developed for perfumers who need to recreate a scent for a specific fragrance, either because the natural flower is too rare to be harvested or because its aroma is too unstable to use in a formula. The same technology might very soon give us the chance to learn what Mars smells like.     

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Tolaas collects the smell samples in a small glass tube called tennex. Then the container is sent to her research partners from International Flavors & Fragrances, an American perfumery corporation headquartered in New York City, which according to Tolaas is “one of a small number of companies which controls how the world smells and tastes.” IFF helped Tolaas in establishing her research lab in Berlin in 2004, and has supported her with full olfactory analysis ever since. After analyzing the sample with a gas chromatograph, IFF sends Tolaas a formula that contains the fingerprint of the smell captured, describing all the subtle nuances in great detail. Using this data chart, Tolaas replicates the smell in her lab, combining some of the nearly 4,000 individual molecules she has at her disposal. The result, Tolaas explains, is as close as possible to the original smell, considering today’s technology development.

“What is important here is that to reproduce certain smell from reality as close as possible, one needs to work with abstract smells molecules,” she says. “So, you have to basically build up a smell from scratch. It sounds very simple but in fact it’s a lot of work. You do a small mistake putting one or two nano units more and the whole batch goes bad, so you’ll have to start from the beginning.”

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Cities tend to change the way they smell through time. That’s especially true for an ever-changing metropolis like Berlin. Tolaas’ SmellScape of Berlin was created between 2002 and 2004, and she mourns the smell of that city: “Back in 2002 Berlin smelled more interesting than today. It was more diverse then.” But certain parts of Berlin, says Tolaas, have stayed the same over time. Like the U-Bahn station Berlin Jannowitzbrücke in the former East Berlin.

“If you remove a couple of tiles from its wall, the smell of the German Democratic Republic would come off immediately,” she says. “It’s that of lignite and a detergent which I suspect was used in all the public buildings, probably supplied by the same, state-owned company. The smell is omnipresent as if The Big Brother is looking at you.”

Smells can reinforce and reflect the identity of the cities—and yet few people think about preserving a city’s olfactory heritage. Indeed, Tolaas may be the only person doing so—but she’s confident in her work. A thousand years from now, she says, someone using her SmellScape charts would be able to recreate truthfully the smell of the cities she’s mapping. Maybe they’d even learn a thing or two about the city’s history.

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But for Tolaas, collecting and recreating smells is first and foremost something she does for art—and for fun.

“It adds quality to being alive. To rediscover the amazing efficiency of senses is so mind-blowing! We live in a world that’s sanitized, sterilized and deodorized to a such an extent, that we don’t have a clue what’s going on anymore,” she says. “That’s not healthy for ... the people, nor the cities or the planet. Our bodies are equipped with this amazing software for the purpose of navigating and communicating the world we live in. And the best part is that these ‘tools’ are free. They cost nothing! So, I’m trying to re-educate people how to use these amazing tools, to understand the world in a different way. And whatever it takes to bring across this experience to humanity, I will do it.”

Watch the Microscopic Process of a Crystal Being Born

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Crystal Birth from Emanuele Fornasier on Vimeo.

Crystals are an important part of our daily lives. These structures are found in the salt that we have at our tables, the snowflakes that we try to catch with our tongues, and the diamonds that gleam in the windows of jewelry stores.

But how, exactly, are crystals formed? This timelapse video, directed by Italian student, Emanuele Fornasier, doesn’t just tell us, it shows us. Inside the world of microscopic chemical reactions that are produced during electrocrystallization, we come face to face with the absolute beauty of nature.

After watching this video, you’ll never look at your table salt the same way.

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.

Anne Rice Talks Inspiration, Atlantis, and, Yes, Vampires

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Before the often-cheesy vampires of modern teenage literature, there were the beautifully dark and complicated vampires of Anne Rice’s novels. These vampires not only reflect a rich and complex inner life that is in constant flux, but also serve as a stand-in for the human condition. Long after we've forgotten about Twilight, it's likely Prince Lestat and his world will continue to populate our imagination.

Rice has written eleven books in her series The Vampire Chronicles, which began in 1976 with Interview with the Vampire. That series will expand further with the 12th installment of the series, Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis, set to go on sale later this month.

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Ahead of the book's release, Atlas Obscura spoke with Anne about her work as a writer, the future of the Chronicles, and her sources of inspiration:

What kind of documents or books do you read while researching for your books? Do you read other vampire literature?

I read and enjoy history, archaeology, mythology, anthropology and religious reading all the time. This feeds continuously into my stories and my plots and my characters. I research on every level: finding out what the interior of a famous Paris cafe looks like by googling for the info; reading books by Graham Hancock on catastrophe theory, or the idea that the world suffered a huge shift in sea level 12 thousand years ago; reading current literature for stimulation. There is just so much reading that goes into my daily life. But I do avoid vampire literature.  I don't want to be distracted by other people's vampires. Exception: Charlaine Harris. I found her Sookie Steakhouse characters stimulating and fun.

You’ve said that you keep up with investigations into ghosts and spirits. What are the most interesting and obscure things you’ve found?

I read the reports world wide of ghost sightings and I read of near-death experiences world wide, and I'm impressed by the patterns that emerge, because those patterns are not easily explainable. Like why do near-death experiences always involve seeing dead people? If they were pure hallucinations, would they not be random?

Have you ever had a supernatural encounter? Do you believe that it’s possible?

No, I've never had a supernatural encounter. My mind is open on it. But nothing has ever happened to me to indicate that there is anything supernatural out there. Never.

The loss of your daughter prompted you to start writing. How did the birth of your son change your relationship to literature? Did it affect your books at all?  

Actually, I have always wanted to be a writer, and was writing a novel and short stories long before my daughter became ill. I was majoring in Creative Writing when she was born. When I set out to write Interview with the Vampire after her death, I drew on my earlier short story with that title. I can't say my son's birth changed my relationship with writing at all. Certainly experiencing his generation, meeting and getting to know his school friends, confronting a younger generation every day with him, all this influenced my confidence in being able to write about young people and from their point of view. All of my life goes into my writing, including my experiences as a parent. Right now one of the joys of my life is that my son is an novelist, that we are fellow novelists.

What is the hardest scene you’ve had to write? And the most enjoyable?  

The hardest was the rape of Marie Ste. Marie in Feast of All Saints. I hated it. The most enjoyable? Hard to say. It's hard work to write any scene, even the most optimistic or the most pessimistic. Some books of mine have been written in periods of optimism and joy, like Blackwood Farm for instance. Other books, like Tale of the Body Thief in dark depression.  

This book changes everything for vampires, and introduces a new species with which they will have to live now. Is this the start of a new era in the Chronicles? Can we expect more books in the future?  

For me Prince Lestat was a personal reboot of the Chronicles. I am in love with Lestat as the leader of the tribe, in love with what he'll do as Prince as the tribe confronts challenges. And yes, I will write a new book flowing directly out of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis. I want very much to go on with the story of the survivors of Atlantis and the vampires. I'm loving doing these books, loving working with suspense and a large cast of characters.  

Why do you think the world needs fantasy fiction?

The world has always needed art in all forms including sculpture, painting, architecture and poetry and prose stories. Most of the great literature of the world is fantasy fiction. We've only known a short time in history when anyone thought "realism" was a practical idea for great literature. Literary history is dominated by Homer's heroes and heroines, Virgil's heroes and heroines, Shakespeare's kings and queens, and gods and goddesses,  and his witches and his ghosts, and the brilliant fantasies of the Bronte sisters and Charles Dickens. Fantasy fiction embraces the highest literary values: plot, spectacle, suspense, great persons, tragedy, pity, catharsis.

What places on earth do you think we would most likely find vampires?  

We find vampires in great dense cities where they can pass for human and feed off the population. Also vampires love beauty. With their heightened senses, they have a deep appreciation for the grandeur of Rome and Venice, of the historic buildings and monuments of Jerusalem, and Cairo, and the natural beauty of New Orleans and the Caribbean, of India, Peru, Brazil ... all the dramatically beautiful and enchanting places.

Vampires don't love conformity or sterility, and are not too comfortable with things that are uniformly modern.

Are there any real places that inspired Atalantaya?

Not really. All I have ever known and seen went into my Atalantaya. It is my utopia, my idea place.

What are your favorite places in the world?

My favorite places in the world include New Orleans, Rome, Florence and Venice, Paris, London, and Jerusalem. I long to see India, and very much want to go to Peru. I have loved Rio de Janeiro, too. I love to travel. I want to get back to England. I want to live in Oxford for a while. I want to visit Scotland. I have so many dreams.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

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