What makes certain bodies of water so beautiful? Is there a precise shade of blue that we are hardwired to want to leap into? Or have decades of Club Med and Sandals Resort advertising created the idea that aquamarine as the color of vacation, relaxation, and freedom?

Former marine biologist turned neurologist Wallace J. Nichols has coined the phrase "blue mind" to describe the relaxed meditative state being in or around water brings to people.  Nichols argues, like our fear of snakes and spiders, we have a kind of neurological dowsing rod, an unconscious system for judging clean water from dirty. Blue means pure, clean, good for drinking and swimming. The "blue mind" sets in. 

In the case of the swimmers at the Blue Lagoon of Buxton, it seems the power of the "blue mind" has gone a bit cloudy.

The northern death adder (Photo: Christopher Watson/Wikimedia)

A "Kimberley death adder" sounds like a creature that J.K. Rowling might have dreamed up and sent to kill Harry Potter, but in fact, it is a new type of very real snake—discovered recently in Western Australia.

Death adders are relatively common in Australia–scientists already knew there were death adders in the Northern Territory, but assumed the snakes in the west were the same species. But according to ABC public broadcasting, this is not the case. Herpetologists in the continent's western region found that: "To our surprise, the snakes from the Kimberley turned out to be more closely related to desert death adders and the Pilbara death adder."

That's a lot of native death adders. (The Guardian headlined its story on the new snake, "Yet another deadly snake species discovered in Australia.") Do they live up to their name? Should you be terrified of going to Australia and encountering one? Yes and no. Their venom is very deadly, but humans, clever as we are, have developed an antidote (and destroyed a fair bit of the snakes' habitat.)

Still, a death adder is a death adder. These are about a foot-and-a-half long and have diamond-shaped heads. Probably best to just steer clear.

Bonus finds: Nanotech hiding in M&Ms, a whale hiding a decades-old hunting weapon in its tail

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

Mystery Castle. (Photo: Melissa/flickr)

The biggest mystery concerning Phoenix, Arizona's Mystery Castle is why someone would want to build an 18-room palace out of rocks and trash.

We already know who built it: Boyce Gulley, a mostly self-taught architect from Arkansas by way of Washington state. We know how he built it: from stone and sand and water hauled in from miles away, so as not to destroy the surroundings, padded out with bric-a-brac like car parts, glass dishes, and old blackboards.

But it turns out the Mystery Castle is also the site of a strange yet heartbreaking tale. Hewn from the detritus of life, it's a memento to lost fathers, kept promises, and letters from beyond the grave. 

This outdoor staircase features salvaged stained glass and telephone pole beams. (Photo: Roger Hsu/flickr)

Until Mary Lou Gulley was 22, she had no idea that her father was building a chimerical mansion. In fact, she wasn't even entirely sure he was alive. Boyce Gulley abandoned his family in 1929, when Mary Lou was five years old. He didn't disappear completely—he exchanged some letters with his wife and daughter—but he never returned to Seattle, and they believed he had deserted them to follow his dreams of being an artist.

In 1945, Mary Lou got a letter from her father, whom she hadn't seen for 16 years. He'd left, he told her at last, because he'd been diagnosed with tuberculosis, and didn't want to be a burden on his family. “It wasn't art I wanted,” he wrote, “it was you.”

The dry air of Arizona, often prescribed for tuberculosis patients, had been more effective than expected, and though he was writing the letter from his deathbed, in the end it wasn't tuberculosis but cancer that did him in. "The theme song of Arizona," Mary Lou noted wryly in her memoir, My Mystery Castle, is: "'I came here umpteen years ago to die, but, oh, look at me now!'"

In the meantime, Gulley's letter said, he'd built this 18-room trash palace, and now he wanted her and her mother, Fran, to live there. They moved in immediately; after all, it was Boyce's final gift. In her book, Mary Lou recalls making childhood demands for a castle of her very own. Elsewhere, she said that one of her earliest memories of her father was of him building her sandcastles on the beach, and promising to make her one big enough to live in. Well, here it was. 

Fittingly, there is sand in the mix at Mystery Castle—and rocks, and adobe, and a natural cement called caliche, and even goat's milk. (The milk helps cement and plaster mixtures stick together and makes them easier to work with.) There's also part of a salvaged car, a 1929 Stutz Bearcat, incorporated into the walls; the windshield is used as a kitchen stove vent, and Gulley made windows out of the wheels, rims, and headlights. The castle features telephone pole beams and a wagon wheel fireplace, and the slate floor of the living room is made of discarded schoolhouse blackboards. There is also a bar and a wedding chapel (both no longer used); their creator called the space between them "Purgatory."

Today, a metal crocodile that Mary Lou has called "the lizard of Oz" stands guard over the trap door. (Photo: Roger Hsu/flickr)

In many ways, Mystery Castle is the ultimate bachelor pad, customized to Boyce Gulley's particular preferences. One room features a single trundle bed that can be rolled across the room on tracks if a guest wants to sleep by the window. The oven is high, so you can check the status of your roast without bending down, but the sink is low, so you can sit to do dishes. On the large upper patio, there's a wishing well, conveniently located above the bar; if you wish loud enough for a cocktail, the bartender can send it up via a dumbwaiter inside the well.

The structure was originally built with 13 fireplaces but no electricity or plumbing. That was not due to Gulley's idiosyncrasies—the site of the castle was just too far from water or power sources.

But there's no doubt Gulley always intended to give the castle to Mary Lou. When he left his daughter the castle, Gulley secreted treasures in the walls for her—jewelry, gold nuggets, $74 in dimes and nickels hidden behind a loose brick. He also hid another treasure beneath a trap door in Purgatory, and he told Mary Lou not to open it until she'd lived in the castle for three years. 

On New Year's Day, 1948, a nervous Mary Lou and her remaining family members pried open the door —the lock was so rusted it had to be broken with a chisel. Inside was gold and cash, but also something more precious: a photo of Boyce Gulley taken shortly before his death, a carefully-preserved valentine Mary Lou had given him as a child, and two letters addressed to her.

Artwork by Mary Lou hangs over one of the castle's 13 fireplaces. (Photo: Tony the Marine/WikiCommons)

Mary Lou describes the letters in depth in her book. One of them was a note explaining why the castle's cat figurines had been encased in cement. (Gulley had come to believe they were blasphemous and were causing the bad luck that made him ill.) The other was a heartfelt missive from a lost but loving dad:

“You probably thought my request strange and a little unfair, but honey, I had to think of some way to keep you here for awhile ... My love for you and Fran is carved on the foundations of the Castle. You see, I hadn't forgotten my promise to you... Now you have your own castle. Our hours together in front of the fire was the reason I built so many fireplaces. Remember the story of the 'Princess and her thirteen fireplaces'?...I never forgot, not even for a minute."

"Castles, Mary, are like life. They aren't all royal comfort and glitter. There will be days when you will get discouraged...But there will always be a rainbow in every tomorrow, and I leave it up to you to find the end."

The text of the letter, as reported, sounds almost too good to be true, and it's possible Mary Lou (who was very much a character) embellished just a smidge. But the substance of her father's bequest—that the castle was hers, and she was its princess—stayed with her for the rest of her life. Mary Lou lived in the castle and gave tours until her death in 2010, and would refer to herself as Mystery Castle's princess with earnest enthusiasm.

Mystery Castle is a wonder in and of itself, but even more so for the way the structure and its hidden secret brought a young woman closer to her lost parent. "He was no longer a mystery man," she writes, "but just a beloved father with courage and an inordinate love of rocks."

We've got a situation. (Photo: JD Hancock/Flickr)

It’s a scene procedural writers probably see in their sleep—a burglar (or bank robber, or other ne’er-do-well) slides open a window, grabs the jewels, and high-tails it, leaving screaming alarm sirens in his wake. The dispatcher gets the call and picks up the radio. Who will stop this menace? Cut to: an officer of the law or two, hanging out in the cruiser or posted up on a corner—and munching on doughnuts.

As the New York Times put it in 1996, “no profession is as closely identified with food as police work is with doughnuts.” Amid interviews with real officers, the article cites a Letterman sketch, The Simpsons, and an Ice Cube song as proof. These days, this trope is so stale you’re more likely to see scenes making fun of it—the Law & Order episode in which terrorists leave explosives in a doughnut box, or Wreck-it Ralph’s pastry police officers, Wynchel and Duncan. Even Special Agent Cooper’s glazed-eyed reverence for the treat plays, like everything else in Twin Peaks, a little camp.

But every cliché was born (or fried) for a reason. A cowboy needs a horse, a fireman needs a dalmatian, and a doctor needs a stethoscope. But why does a cop need a doughnut?

The common-sense response traces this tradition to the middle of the 20th century, when police departments started switching from foot-based beats to driving ones. Officers working a graveyard shift needed someplace to park the cruiser, fuel up on caffeine and sugar, and maybe fill out some paperwork or make an emergency call. Because doughnut shops had to stay open late to prepare for the morning rush, they fit the bill nicely, explains Michael Krondl in his book The Donut. (As fate would have it, around this same time, two pipin’ fresh chains started sugaring up the night—though they had each started a decade or so earlier, by the late 1950s Krispy Kreme and Dunkin’ Donuts had each sprinkled their half of the country with cop-friendly franchises).

Meanwhile, having officers around made the shop workers feel safe—as early as 1950, one small-time inn owner threatened a larger, litigious hotel chain by boasting, “our High Sheriff and our local troop of state police… help themselves to coffee and doughnuts in my kitchen when the spirit so moves them, which seems about every day.” This foreshadowed a rash of law-enforcement “specials”—enough that a 1964 issue of Police warned its readers, “Do not accept gifts—donuts and coffee. This gives the impression of partiality.” In some small towns, doughnut shops even have desks set aside for policemen who need to work through their breaks. “This symbiotic relationship gave rise to the popular conception of cops being addicted to doughnuts,” writes Zach W. Brown in American Profile. 

NYPD officers case an East Village Dunkin' Donuts. (Photo: David Shankbone/WikiCommons CC BY 3.0)

Many officers have their own personal spin on this tale. There’s the Reno-based patrolman who caffeinated at a casino until the local doughnut shop owner intervened, and the female captain who needed someplace to use the restroom because she couldn’t just unzip and let rip like her colleagues. Beyond the convenient infrastructure, there is the food itself: the sugar, carbohydrates, and fat provide a triple-shot of energy that’s welcome halfway through a long night of patrolling. As former Philadelphia police chief Frank Rizzo recalls, “You got out there, walked around, rolled in the streets with criminals, and burned the calories off.” Doughnuts are ready right away, unlike even 24-hour diner food, and they come in a bunch of varieties (Lou Clark of the Oakland Police Department told Krondl that in the early ‘60s, superiors would play “guess-the-flavor” if cops returned to the station with stains on their shirts). Plus, they’re cheap, “so they can be discarded with little guilt in case of a hot call in the middle of a snack break,” one policeman points out. Add all this up and the appeal is obvious. Some departments even call them "power rings."

Stare harder into the hole, though, and the cop-doughnut relationship isn’t just a marriage of convenience—it’s deeper than that. In fact, we’ve officially stuffed the protecting-and-serving citizens of our country with sugary pastries since at least World War I, when the Salvation Army sent female volunteers to France to cook doughnuts and bring them to the front. The originator of this tradition, a young ensign named Helen Purviance, knelt before a potbelly stove to make the first batch in a frying pan. “There was also a prayer in my heart that somehow this home touch would do more for those who ate the doughnuts than satisfy a physical hunger,” she said later. For a while, U.S. soldiers were actually called “doughboys,” and though they may have originally gotten this nickname some other way, the millions of doughnuts certainly didn’t hurt.

Salvation Army "doughnut girls," frying up treats for the troops in 1920. (Photo: The Salvation Army Chattanooga/Public Domain)

By 1927, American veterans holed up in France were demanding so many breakfast doughnuts that the French had to send for bigger frying kettles. When the Red Cross jumped on the bandwagon during World War II, they churned out so many they started charging for them, a (quickly overturned) decision that has earned them decades of enmity from the armed forces. Though it was solidified in the war, this tradition of doughnuts-as-care goes back even further—in a November 1898 New York Times article about a Thanksgiving party for an NYC regiment, a volunteer cook describes serving “home-made doughnuts” to the hungry soldiers. “No store doughnuts for our troops,” she says.

After the wars ended, the returning soldiers took their taste for doughnuts back with them—and the relief organizations did the same with their taste for giving them away, quickly making them a staple of various disaster-relief efforts, where they filled the stomachs of victims and rescuers alike—including policemen. Somewhere in the modern cop-doughnut partnership, there’s a crumb of this original gesture of care.

A North Carolina police officer visits a Krispy Kreme during his first day on the job. (Photo: Mark Doliner/Flickr)

In a 2012 interview, theorist Lauren Berlant spoke of how contemporary working life “puts pressure on... small pleasures to sustain our survival.” A doughnut is among the smallest of pleasures, but the sustenance it provides to a working police officer is literal, social and emotional. Unlike their wartime counterparts, police officers don’t have strict front lines—they go where the conflict is—but doughnut shops, identical and always open, provide areas of reliable respite. (When zones do grow more defined, so does this parallel; the center of Boston locked down after the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombings, but a few local Dunks stayed open, at police officers’ requests.)

“When we’re in a stakeout with another unit, we bring a dozen doughnuts just to break the ice,” New York City Detective Tom F. Weiner Jr. told the Times. One group of Michigan officers, blue at the prospect of their local bakery closing, pooled their money and bought it. It’s now a 24-hour community hotspot called—what else—Cops & Doughnuts. There you can get cinnamon-twist “Night Shifts” and lemon-filled “Tasers.” In early September, a customer at San Francisco’s Happy Donuts caught two police officers sitting at a table and joking about police shootings—proof that the sense of camaraderie in a doughnut shop can glaze over common sense. Even police who eschew doughnuts talk about the choice in terms of their responsibilities, both to themselves and others. Doughnuts are a headline-punchline in ubiquitous articles about police fitness, often atop stories like this one, in which officers talk to each other about how they overeat when agitated by their jobs. If you can’t bring the box of doughnuts, stories about how you wanted to eat the whole thing will suffice.

Protesters dangling doughnuts in front of riot cops in Montreal. (Photo: Alexis Gravel/Flickr)

To those who already distrust law enforcement, pointing out the doughnut connection is a way to smear frosting on the face of the powerful. Protesters have been known to dangle doughnuts on fishing rods in front of riot police, and there’s a Reddit group dedicated to “law enforcement abuse stories” called “Bad Cop No Donut.”

The doughnut may be a one-sided shape, but it’s a many-sided rhetorical weapon. No longer content to merely get their just desserts, police are using doughnuts to give back, too—to show that they understand that in the contemporary world, the protectors sometimes need to prove themselves. These days, cops brandish doughnuts to poke holes in their own mythos and bond with their communities, often simultaneously. They climb pink Dunkin’ Donuts roofs for charity, send patrol horses through the drive-thru, or make sure they’re the first people at the debut of a new shop. Sometimes, the jokes have local flavor—after Oregon legalized marijuana, the Portland Police released a chart comparing different weed amounts to the size of a popular regional doughnut. (If you’re carrying more than one doughnut’s worth, you’re over the limit). The website Police Daily collects photos of cops chowing down, often with big, self-aware smiles.

Members of Georgia's Mariettta Police Department give out doughnuts at an annual fundraiser. (Photo: Marietta Public Information Office/Flickr)

“One thinks of policing as a sort of disciplinary, paternal, stern and potentially violent occupation, and doughnuts are fluffy [and] sweet” wrote historian Jim Paradis in an email. “The contrast… makes some effort to humanize the cops, who greatly need humanizing.” The cops are aware of this: Corporal Mark Ivey, who starred in a Wilmington, Pennsylvania Police Department video called “Cops & Donuts: An Explainer,” defended the decision by calling it “a creative way to strengthen the department’s relationship with the community.” “By showing that you can poke fun at yourself, that you can laugh at yourself and that you are just an everyday citizen going out there and doing a difficult job and that you need their help, that's how you can solve this problem," of strained relationships, Ivey said.

That’s a lot of weight for a squishy pastry—even one with the strength of history—but anecdotal evidence reveals cops are upping their dosage. When asked whether police ever visit the store, an employee of Union Square Donuts in Somerville, Massachusetts affirmed. “One came in this morning,” she said. “He got a whole box.”

Ava the dinosaur (Photo: Triebold Paleontology Inc.)

Ava the dinosaur is not very big: a kindergartner could look it in the eye. "This is a really cute dinosaur, if dinosaurs can be cute,' Michael Triebold, the fossil hunter who helped uncover it, told CBS News.

Ava's bones were first found three years ago, in the Judith River Formation in Montana, and as the fossils were uncovered and used to create a display model, the paleontologists realized they might have discovered something special: a new species of dinosaur.

Their hunch has not been independently confirmed yet, but the staff at Triebold's Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center in Woodland Park is convinced that there are enough differences between this dinosaur and others on record to make it distinct. It is similar to the Avaceratops, which is why it's nicknamed Ava. But it's missing key features, like a nose horn. 

Although the triceratops is the best-known dinosaur of the certopsidae group of dinosaur, there have been dozens of dinosaurs identified that have beaks, horns and frills. Like its relatives, Ava would have eaten plants. Imagine, basically, a baby rhino, except a lizard with horns, and you're about there.

Bonus finds: Toilet snakes, a watch with a secret code inside, 3,500 knives

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

You could live in LOTRO's The Shire. (All screencaps by Eric Grundhauser) 

Visiting Middle Earth is every fantasy fan’s (sometimes literal) dream. To J.R.R. Tolkien, the setting and cartography of his fantasy world was as important as any of the characters—and his locations, like blasted Mordor or the idyllic Shire, have become the inspiration for just about every fantasy tale ever since, not to mention a number of direct translations of the books to movies, radio, comics, and just about every other medium including video games.

So when a game company called Turbine, Inc. released The Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO), an open-world game that set out to create a living Middle Earth, it was no small task. They also had to do so without rights to the films or other media based on, or related to J.R.R. Tolkien’s seminal works of fantasy—no visions of Frodo’s hobbit house from the movies, or a Gandalf that looked like Ian McKellen. Their source material had to be the text of the the novels and their own designs.

Somehow, though, those limitations have made LOTRO one of the most faithful visions of Tolkien’s world.

The game launched in 2007 as The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar, although the latter part of the name was later dropped, and now it is simply known as The Lord of the Rings Online. An MMORPG in the vein of World of Warcraft, LOTRO received strong initial reviews that rightfully praised the title for how faithful the world was to Tolkien’s work. It even garnered a few Game of the Year honors from sites like Gamespy and MMORG.com.

Success was fleeting, however. Despite a huge boost in both membership and revenue when they moved from a subscription-based model to a free-to-play system in 2010, over the last five years, Turbine’s Middle Earth has become less and less crowded. Turbine is tight lipped about their exact number of registered users (they declined to comment on the question for this piece), but in 2015 they closed down 19 of their servers.

However the doomsayers may be being a bit hasty. Because in its indomitable, hobbit-like way, the game still seems to be an active, growing world.

Random ruins are about as common as hobbits in Middle Earth.

**

The main storyline that players quest their way through runs parallel to the main events in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, often running into major characters and events from the original books. Each expansion to the game, in addition to expanding the world, has extended the storyline further along that of the books, currently reaching to the Battle of Osgiliath, around the beginning of the Return of the King.

The landscape is a mix of places Tolkien invented and places that Turbine invented. Many of the most famous set pieces from the Fellowship’s journey made it into the game, like the ruins of Weathertop and Helm’s Deep, as well less prominent locales like the dwarven region of Thorin’s Gate. “Where Tolkien left some details vague or unfinished, we have often invented locations of our own,”  said a representative from Turbine’s development team, “and as such, many of the locations we visit in Rohan are original, as the Eastemnet especially was not fully described in Tolkien’s universe.” Their job, he said, was fleshing out places that Tolkien never got around to describing.

When players start the game, they can choose to create a character based on one of Tolkien’s friendly races. Either Human, Elf, Dwarf, Beorning, or of course, Hobbit. You then choose from a list of fantasy classic jobs like Guardian, Burglar, or Minstrel. While halfling characters are not my favorite type to play, if there ever was a game where it was appropriate, it is LOTRO, thus the latest incarnation of Baerf the Digital Explorer became an unusually attractive hobbit. A hunter to be exact.

That's one attractive hobbit.

As a hobbit, you start your life (after a quick story adventure where you run into Frodo and Sam and help Aragorn defend a city) in The Shire. Unlike in the films, where it was presented as just a sort of clump of hobbit holes, The Shire of LOTRO is a sprawling, hilly series of little towns. From the capital town of Michel Delving to the more famous Hobbiton, the area is all green grass burms and round doors, set into the ground. Relaxing music and the peaceful nature sounds help complete the Shire’s bucolic vibe.

Then there’s the perfectly hobbit-y tasks and quests the people of The Shire are dealin’ with. Maybe it’s retrieving an old recipe for ale, or helping deliver the mail, or trying out a pie. Sure there are a few instances where you are asked to clear some wolves off a farm, or something else of a slightly violent nature, but in the end it is all very quaint. For lack of a better description, it’s nice. While that might not seem like a compliment in an adventure game, The Shire of LOTRO is so warm and pleasant that some players never actually leave. Above all, it feels like the kind of untouched symbol of goodness that Tolkien had in mind.

In fact, in a perfect mirroring of the expansive, naturalistic tones of the books, much of the game feels sort of serene. Other players may ride past from time to time, or one might come across the occasional roadside NPC, yet for the most part, it seems very much like you are out there on your own. Thanks to a game-worldwide chat channel, the you can easily find people to team up with (forming a “Fellowship”), and the game doesn’t feel empty, but while wandering down the long roads of Middle Earth, it’s easy to get lost in a personal quest.

The Shire. It makes me warm just thinking about it.

Who needs adventure? Just look at how nice the scenery is.

But as beautiful as life in The Shire was, Baerf needed to explore, like Frodo and Bilbo before him. So after helping a number of my neighbors with their cooking and party planning, I hit the road. My plan was to walk to the elf city of Rivendell, just as Frodo had done in The Fellowship of the Ring, and see how many famous locations from the book I could come across.

Leaving The Shire by the main road, I first came to the Buckleberry Ferry which Frodo and the gang used to escape the Black Riders on their way to Bree. Unfortunately it was closed.

The Buckleberry Ferry isn't moving.

Not far past that, just as in the book, I came to Bree itself, which is one of the major player hubs in the game, providing a hustle and bustle that you didn’t find in The Shire. Player characters were in relative abundance in Bree, just riding through or hanging out. A small crowd of three to five adventurers could be found milling around each of the town gates most times.   

The player community in LOTRO is notably friendly and seem to enjoy roleplaying in the world, in comparison to some of the more toxic MMORPG crowds. The global chat channel is full of people congratulating each other on marriages and IRL events. So, even though Bree was a metropolis compared to The Shire, it felt more exciting and welcoming than dangerous.

Bree, the Chicago of Middle Earth

Leaving Bree, I continued east down the road, passing famous location like the Midgewater Marshes and the Barrow-Downs. I eventually came to Weathertop, the old ruins where Aragorn fought off the Black Riders and Frodo was stabbed. They rose up from their hill in the distance, and I decided to try and get up there, a dangerous proposition as I was getting into higher level areas the further east I went. However I was able to climb to the top and get a great view of the surrounding Lone-Lands, with its dry plains and ancient ruins.

As I stared out at the landscape, Baerf was killed for the first time, by a giant bug. Middle Earth is a dangerous place for a hobbit.

Weathertop in the distance.

Continuing on, I passed into an area called the Trollshaws. In contrast to the open plains of the Lone-lands or the hills of The Shire, the Trollshaws is a densely forested area teeming with aggressive creatures. But Rivendell was just on the other side of the map. As I entered the area, the game warned me that it was far too difficult for my level, and more worryingly, that due to the game’s somewhat confusing payment system, I would need to purchase full access to the area with in-game currency. In other words, I could explore it, but at my own risk.

Baerf pressed on, getting attacked by every boar, bear, and elk in the forest. The surroundings were lovely, but I was now being hunted, and the game’s serenity turned to a frantic chase. Every so often a high-level player would ride past, and while I thought to ask for help, they were usually long gone before I could get a word out.

Eventually Baerf was gored by an elk, waking up back in Bree, about 20-30 minutes from where he died. Undaunted, I set out once again for Rivendell, this time making it as far as the Ford of Bruinen, a simple river crossing where the enchanted waters washed away the Black Riders that were chasing a wounded Frodo. Here too, the Ford was able to save Baerf from the bears that were chasing him. Standing in the safety of the river, excited to have made it as far as I had, it dawned on me just how similar my journey had been to that of Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring, without even trying to make it so. It was as close to the experience of adventuring through Middle Earth as any interpretation I’ve seen. Unfortunately, it was also about as far as I would go.

That elk was the one that killed Baerf as I took this screencap.

Taking refuge on the Ford of Bruenin

On the far side of the Ford were more bears, and I quickly lost the trail to Rivendell, finally being brought down by one of the rabid animals. For a small hobbit, the road to Rivendell seemed to be as dangerous as it was in the books, and I couldn’t reach the city.

Looking to see some of the other architecture of the world, I traveled to the dwarf area, Thorin’s Gate. The design was appropriately brutal and geometric, with statues and monumental sculptures of proud dwarf heroes. By contrast, I then visited the small elf town of Celondim, which was full of the kind of delicate, ethereal design that screams “ELVES BUILT THIS.”

Thorin's Gate is definitely for the dwarves.

Celondim is definitely for the elves.

Without leveling up further, I couldn’t visit many of the places left in the game world, like the Witch King’s kingdom of Angmar, the contested city of Osgiliath, or even Rivendell.

Even though it might not be as big as it once was, LOTRO’s Middle Earth refuses to die, and according to the developers, they are nowhere near finished, “We’re fond of telling ourselves and our players about the places we could go after Morder—Northern Mirkwood, Rhûn, Aman, Umbar, Angband. Minas Morgul, Númenor… maybe as a memory?” the developers say, ”But the truth is, we dream just as much about the stories we can tell in those places. As with [the books], narrative and cartography are inextricably linked.”

Chemistry Ig Nobel winner Javier Morales gets interrupted by Miss Sweetie Poo in 2009. Morales and his cohort discovered a way to turn tequila into diamonds. (Photo: Eric Workman/Improbable Research) 

People walking through Harvard Square last night may have heard, at various times: the sound of thousands yelling "HUH?," the flapping wings of a lone flamingo, and the inventor of the floppy disk singing an original song about living with cancer—each followed by vigorous applause.

This was no weird fraternity rite—at least, not completely. It was the ceremony for the Ig Nobel Prizes, an annual tradition that simultaneously subverts and celebrates scientific culture (and award ceremony culture) by honoring research that "makes people laugh, then think."

This year's prizes went to teams of researchers who, among other things, attached artificial tails to chickens to make them walk like dinosaurs; partially unboiled an egg; traced the universality of the expression "Huh?"; and proved that all mammals take about the same amount of time to urinate (roughly 21 seconds). 

The trappings of the ceremony were themselves prizeworthy. At the beginning of the night, the honorees were led onstage by a giant leash; they were then given their awards by "genuine, genuinely bemused" Nobel laureates. Each winner received ten trillion (Zimbabwean) dollars, and many demonstrated their research—the chicken team strutted around with plunger-tails, and a group that studied the biomedical benefits of kissing encouraged the audience to make out like crazy.

The stage was lit by human spotlights covered in silver body paint, and the proceedings were punctuated by very short lectures, songs, an original opera, and two Official Paper Airplane Throwing Sessions. Acceptance speech length provisions were enforced by the greatest invention of the 21st century, Miss Sweetie Poo—an eight-year-old girl who, at the time limit, approached the microphone and politely repeated, "Please stop, I'm bored." (She's much more effective than the Oscars orchestra). To honor the event's 25th anniversary, the Ig Nobels brought out a parade of Miss Sweetie Poos, who overtook the stage in a cascade of interruptions. 

The event is the capstone of the equally zany organization Improbable Research, which collects such research all year and releases it in the form of podcasts, blog posts and events. Boston-area fans can join the fun, and meet this year's winners, at Saturday's Ig Informal Lectures. And for those too shy to speak to such luminaries, remember: you can't go wrong with a simple "huh?"

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.

Anchorage Island on Suwarrow Atoll. (Photo: Suwarrow/Creative Commons)

The phrase "sole survivor" evokes scenes of violent disaster—a plane crash; an explosion in a mine; the eruption of a volcano whose lava destroys a city and all its inhabitants but one. The horrific details make an indelible impression on the survivors and those who hear their stories. One woman survived a Peruvian plane crash that killed 91 and stumbled injured through the jungle for days, during which she had to dig out 30 maggots that had burrowed into a gaping wound on her arm. In 2005, a man survived the Sago mine explosion that released toxic methane and carbon monoxide, slowly killing his 11 co-workers as they wrote final letters to their loved ones.

These are traumatic tales. But not all sole survivors have been through a hell unleashed on them by fates beyond their control. Another kind of "sole survivor" is one who survives solo. Take the story of Tom Neale, dumped by boat on a tiny atoll in the Pacific, where he lived alone for 16 years. Neale, a New Zealander, rode out violent storms in a rickety shack, ate a diet heavy on fish and coconuts, and wore nothing but a loincloth. It is the remarkable tale of a shipwrecked survivor, but for one detail: Neale did not land on the atoll by accident or during a terrible storm. He traveled there willingly and enthusiastically, determined to live a simple, solitary existence on an island he could call his own.

Formerly a shopkeeper, Neale became fixated on the tiny Cook Island atoll of Suwarrow (also known as Suvorov) in 1943, when author and traveler Robert Frisbie spoke of it to him after visiting. In his memoir, An Island to Oneself, Neale wrote of their conversation:

That afternoon Frisbee entranced me, and I can see him now on the veranda, the rum bottle on the big table between us, leaning forward with that blazing characteristic earnestness, saying to me, “Tom Neale, Suvorov is the most beautiful place on earth, and no man has really lived until he has lived there.”

In 1945, a ship passed by Suwarrow—which is 200 miles from the nearest populated land—to drop off supplies for the coastwatchers New Zealand had stationed there during World War II. Neale hitched a ride and saw Suwarrow's gently swaying palm trees, pristine sands, and soothing turquoise waters firsthand. Enchanted, he decided he simply must live there.

Suwarrow Atoll. (Photo: NASA World Wind/Public domain)

To prepare for his stay, which he envisioned would last for years, Neale stockpiled supplies. On the island of Rarotonga in the Cook Islands, he perplexed store owners by buying their entire inventories of flour, sugar, kerosene, and coffee beans. As word spread about his grand plans, villagers offered gifts and even companionship. Neale politely refused the advances of several women who asked to accompany him, suspecting it would not be long before he came to resent their company. He did, however, choose two non-human companions: a cat named Mrs. Thievery (named for her favorite hobby), and her kitten, Mr. Tom-Tom.

Armed with tins of food, tools, seeds, and a motley collection of paperbacks, Neale arrived on Suwarrow following six days at sea. The island was bereft of any human presence, but World War II coast watchers had left behind a hut with water tanks, which would become his home.

Neale's life on the atoll is described in fascinating detail in An Island to Oneself. As he wrote, he soon fell into a routine, spending the daylight hours building, cleaning, and tending to the garden he had made. As day turned to evening he would sit on a wooden box at the beach, watching the sun set while drinking a bowl of tea. But there were less comforting chores, too. The task of killing six pigs who threatened to destroy the garden brought Neale much anguish—after spearing the first one and hearing its screams, he wrote in his journal of feeling “melancholy,” and decided to bury the animal rather than eat it.

Ten months after his arrival on Suwarrow, Neale received his first visitors: two couples on a yacht, who were astonished by the orderliness of his abode. Not one to lower his living standards just because he lived in a shack, Neale boiled his sheets weekly, kept a tidy room, and ate his meals on a tablecloth. When the visitors departed a few days later, leaving well wishes and a half-drunk bottle of rum, Neale took up a new project: reconstructing a destroyed pier that had embarrassed him with its unsightliness.

For the next six months, he spent up to five hours every day dragging, rolling, and carrying coral stones to the water’s edge, setting them on the pier’s fragmentary foundations. When the interminable task was finally complete, Neale had single-handedly built a neat, structurally sound jetty using just rocks, patience, and hard work. The next day, a violent storm attacked the island, completely destroying the newly finished pier.

(Image: Mr Minton/Creative Commons)

Thus began a run of bad luck. Having exhausted his tobacco supply, Neale experienced torturous cravings. He dreamed nightly of soothing cigarettes, chocolate, beef, and fat, juicy ducks. But the mental torture would soon pale in comparison to physical pain. Casting an anchor on the beach one day, Neale felt a searing stab along his spine and suddenly every movement was agony. In his memoir he wrote:

When I stood still I felt no pain, but the instant I tried to move, the smallest action sent spasms galloping through every muscle. … I was certain I had dislocated my back, and remember telling myself, “Neale, if you give in, this is the end.”

Taking four hours to make the short journey back to his shack, Neale laid down in his bed and, between bouts of unconsciousness, hoped for a miracle. Incredibly, one arrived—in the form of Peb and Bob, two American yachtsmen who stopped in at the atoll while en route to Samoa. (Peb, as it turned out, was more formally known as James Rockefeller Jr., a member of one of the United States' wealthiest dynasties.) The duo, astonished to find Neale on the “uninhabited” island, fed him, massaged his back, and, having returned him to good health, departed with a pledge that they would send a ship to fetch him. Two weeks later, the promised ship arrived, plucking Neale from his two-year life of island solitude and ferrying him back to Rarotonga.

The comparatively bustling island of Rarotonga. (Photo: mercyrains/Creative Commons)

Neale did not take kindly to being back among the comforts of civilization. Clocks were an intrusive nuisance, cars moved noisily and too fast, and trousers compared unfavorably with the comfort of a cotton loincloth. All Neale wanted was to return to Suwarrow, but the government forbade it. Disconsolate, he took a job in a warehouse. Six years passed before a friend with a 30-foot boat offered to take Neale back to his beloved atoll. Honor-bound, Neale visited Rarotonga’s Resident Commissioner to inform him of his plans and received off-the-record approval.

Neale’s second stay on Suwarrow lasted two-and-a-half years, only ending when the increasing presence of pearl divers at the atoll began to wear on his patience. A three-year break in Rarotonga allowed him to pen An Island to Oneself before returning for his final, decade-long stay on Suwarrow. In 1977, stricken with stomach cancer, he was transported back to Rarotonga, where he died at the age of 75.

Despite his long stretches of solitary living, Neale claimed he never felt lonely. The few times he wished someone were with him, he wrote in his memoir, were “not because I wanted company but just because all this beauty seemed too perfect to keep to myself.”

Water demonstrates a few of its unique properties. (Photo: Jonas Bergsten/WikiCommons Public Domain)

In the pantheon of chemical compounds, water is our Zeus. Its properties make it well-suited for various vital purposes—it's a near-universal solvent, it shuffles around other vital molecules and helps them keep their shape, and it travels pretty well itself, changing from liquid to solid to vapor. Our planet and our bodies are swimming in it. When we travel outside of our atmosphere, it's the first thing we search for, because we (literally) can't imagine life without it. 

Because of this, we've got a pretty good handle on the stuff. People have been storing water in cisterns and ferrying it through pipes for at least 5000 years. But never through teeny-tiny pipes, until 1961—when things got weird. That year, Nikolai Fedyakin, a chemist at the Technological Institute of Kostroma in the then-Soviet Union, noticed that when he sealed pure water in extremely narrow glass tubes and let it sit for long periods of time, a weird substance collected in the upper parts of the tubes. The substance, Fedyakin thought, must have been H20. He had purified his experimental setup scrupulously, even swapping out glass tubes for sterilized quartz, and there was nothing else in the system. But this new water looked very different—like small beads of waxy oil—and acted it, too, boiling at anomalously high temperatures and "freezing" at strangely low ones. Further experiments revealed that it was 40 percent denser than your average water, and 15 times as viscous. "It was as though water had somehow coagulated in the tubes," writes Philip Ball in H20. Fedyakin started calling it "offspring water," the way others might talk about Son of Superman. 

News of the discovery trickled up to Boris V. Deryagin, a renowned Soviet surface chemist who worked in Moscow. Deryagin whisked Fedyakin to his lab and basically took over his research, publishing 10 articles about the "new" water over the course of just a few years. In the late 1960s, he began presenting his work internationally, first in England, then in New Hampshire.

A 1970s-era chemistry setup, demonstrated by an EPA worker. (Photo: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration/Public Domain)

Inevitably, most dismissed the man with the magic water as a goofy crackpot. Those who were absorbed fell hard, though—Desmond Bernal, the crystallographer who first described the physical structure of regular water molecules, called it "the most important physical-chemical discovery of the century"—and some were in the position to start making weird water of their own. Joseph Stromberg, whose great uncle, Robert R. Stromberg, was one of the scientists originally intrigued by the water, describes the painstaking process in Slate: 

"He faithfully followed the Soviet process, using freshly drawn-out, ultrathin Pyrex capillary tubes to avoid contamination. After condensing water in the tubes and leaving them alone for about 18 hours, he’d return to find tiny bubbles of polywater congealing inside. He painstakingly extracted the stuff with a syringe, drop by drop, and over the course of months, was able to amass a gram or two of it."

Soon, labs in Europe and America were full of graduate students carefully gathering minuscule amounts of the stuff, and saying things like “if only we could make a thimbleful.” There was enough to do some further tests, though, and in 1969, a paper in Science really soaked up attention. A collaboration between Stromberg and spectroscopist Ellis R. Lippincott, the study said that the new material had a spectroscopic profile unlike any other that had ever been documented, making it entirely unique. The authors postulated that the material's molecules were arranged in a chain of perfectly symmetrical hexagons, making it more stable than normal water, even at room temperature. They also proposed a new name: polywater.

The surface of Venus—or of a polywater-addled Earth, according to some experts. (Image: NASA-JPL/Public Domain)

Now, everyone started paying attention. It helped that much of the Western world had recently read Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, in which a similarly tricky bit of H20 (ice, this time) destroys the world simply by being differently shaped. Suddenly, polywater wasn't just a strange discovery—it was a technology, and one whose potential for good (as, say, a steam engine lubricant or nuclear reactor shield) was far outmatched by its capacity for evil. Experts and laypeople alike began imagining dire scenarios. One scientist warned that a polywater release could turn Earth into "a reasonable facsimile of Venus." Another, the inverse of Bernal, called it “(potentially) the most dangerous material on earth ... treat it as the most deadly virus until its safety is established,” he wrote in Nature, because "once the polymer nuclei become dispersed in the soil it will be too late to do anything." Still others thought it would waxify the oceans.

Though many scientists, including Stromberg, denigrated what they saw as logically suspect fearmongering, this reading of the situation persisted, and polywater became yet another thing to keep out of the hands of the Soviets. “Good news,” wrote the Wall Street Journal in 1969, “the U.S. has apparently closed the polywater gap, and the Pentagon is bankrolling efforts to push this country’s polywater technology ahead of the Soviet Union’s.” The June 1973 issue of Popular Mechanics taught interested parties how to make their own polywater. "Perhaps you can think of more things to do with your samples," the authors encouraged. And even after several articles in their own newspaper had copped to the true order of discovery, a 1970 New York Times squib reported that the Soviets had finally made polywater. "A similar discovery was reported by United States scientists several months ago," it concluded.

Polywater was thought to have a hexagonal structure, not unlike honeycomb. (Photo: Sean.hoyland/WikiCommons Public Domain)

There were skeptics, too—Richard Feynman, for example, wondered why no animals had taken advantage of the fact that drinking water and letting it convert to polywater would be a fine, efficient way to run a metabolism. And many of the scientists hoping to expand on earlier findings found the previous results impossible to replicate. The bubble finally burst for good in late 1970, when physiology postdoc Denis Rousseau decided to go play handball and then evaporate the sweat from his T-shirt. Sure enough, the gummy, oily substance looked, acted, and spectroscoped a whole lot like polywater. Rousseau and his colleagues marshaled enough damning evidence for a basically incontrovertible article of their own; by 1973, the big players, including Deryagin, disavowed their earlier findings, realizing that all of the solution's strange properties could be explained if you assumed that the H20 was contaminated by plastic, air, and people juice. This conclusion, wrote the Sydney Morning Herald, "can be received with considerable relief." So much for polywater. 

In Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut first introduces ice-nine through an interaction between a writer and a scientist, who has proposed it as a hypothetical. The writer follows its implications through, asking, "If the streams flowing through the swamp froze as ice-nine, what about the rivers and lakes the streams fed?" "They'd freeze," says the scientist,

"But there is no such thing as ice-nine." "And the oceans the frozen rivers fed?" "They'd freeze, of course," he snapped. "I suppose you're going to rush to market with a sensational story about ice-nine now. I tell you again, it does not exist!"

Of course, in the book, ice-nine does exist, and all the fears—of character, reader, and author alike—are, to some degree, realized. But the sensational story of polywater ends instead with a lesson about science: namely, that no matter how carefully we try to distill, purify, and isolate our knowledge, some sweat is going to get in there. That, more even than water, is what really makes us living creatures. 

The site of the 1981 Pope John Paul II assassination attempt (Photo: Public Domain)

It was late afternoon on May 13^th 1981 when Pope John Paul II emerged from St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, ready for his weekly audience in the square.  Thousands were waiting for a glimpse, a photo or perhaps even a touch from the adored spiritual leader of the Catholic Church. At about 4:50 p.m., the Pope stepped into the white open jeep specifically made for him, known as the “Popemobile,” and rode around the elliptical-shaped plaza, weaving through the festive crowd. 

At approximately 5:19 p.m., the jeep stopped on the southwest side of the Basilica steps. Hands, cameras and crosses extended from the crowd. So did a gun. Shots rang out. In an instant, Pope John Paul II clutched his chest and slumped into the arms of his aids as a bright red stain slowly extended across his white cassock. Pope John Paul II had been shot. 

The shooter, Mehmet Ali Agca, was immediately seized at the scene as he attempted to flee the square. According to official reports, he kept repeating to police that he “couldn’t care less about life.” They also found a letter in his pocket that read, “I, Agca, have killed the Pope so that the world may know of the thousands of victims of imperialism.” Fortunately, Agca’s prewritten note was incorrect. Ultimately, he was not able to assassinate the Pope.

34 years later, Agca’s exact motives or who put him up to it are still unknown. The 1981 attempted assassination of the Pope remains clouded in mystery and conspiracy. 

Details about Mehmet Ali Agca’s early life are murky. He was born in 1958 in the Malatya province of central Turkey, about 200 miles from the Syrian border. Throughout his youth, he was known as a petty criminal and was likely also a heroin smuggler between Turkey and Bulgaria. Sometime in the mid to late 1970s, Agca reportedly became a member of the Grey Wolves, a Turkish neo-fascist nationalistic terrorist organization that may have relied on the financial backing of the Turkish mafia. 

Their mission was to unite all Turkish people into a greater, more powerful Turkey… “from the Balkans to Central Asia.”  The Grey Wolves were willing to accomplish this through violence and assassinations.  According to the BBC, at some point, Agca moved to Syria at the behest of the Grey Wolves, where he was trained to be a terrorist.

The Fiat Popemobile in which Pope John Paul II was the subject of an assassination attempt. This vehicle is now in the "Carriage museum" of the Vatican City. (Photo: Jebulon/CC0)

Shooting the Pope was not Agca’s first foray into murder. In 1979, Agca was convicted and jailed for the high-profile assassination of prominent newspaper editor Abdi Ipekci. In the months prior to his murder in February 1979, Ipekci wrote articles exposing Turkey’s far-right groups. Reports suggest that Grey Wolves’ leader Abdullah Çatlı, upset with the bad press, sent Agca to do the deed. 

When Agca was caught, convicted and jailed for the murder, he did not serve his whole sentence. He escaped from the high-security prison by wearing a private's uniform and simply walking out, instigating the theory that he had help from high-level people. Shortly after the breakout, the Turkish paper Milliyet published a written threat that Agca had sent them, which read that the Pope was an “agent of Russian and U.S. imperialism”. The fugitive vowed to kill him. 

After escaping from prison, Agca roamed around the Mediterranean and the Balkans, assuming different identities and carrying out underground missions for the Grey Wolves. Despite being wanted and Interpol distributing his picture around the world, he avoided arrest. During this time, he was again suspected of another murder- this time of a grocer and disloyal former member of another Turkish terrorist group. Prosecutors were unable to press charges, though. 

Agca arrived in Rome a few days prior to May 13^th, 1981, perhaps with long-time acquaintance Oral Çelik. An Italian judge would later claim that Çelik had helped Agca carry out the attack, promoting the theory that the assassination attempt on the Pope was a much larger conspiracy. 

What isn’t disputed, though, is that Agca arrived at St. Peter’s Square, and immersed himself in the crowd. Just as the Pope stopped to touch the hands of the public, he opened fire. 

Two photographs tell the tale of the horrific scene. The first one shows the Pope reaching out into the crowd as hands and cameras push forward. On the far right side of the picture is a hand clutching a gun, pointed directly at the Pope. No one but the camera notices. The second image, undoubtedly taken a few moments later, shows the Pope slumped into the hands of his aids. People are crying and screaming in the background as his aid struggles to hold the Pope up. 

The site of the shooting is marked by a small marble tablet bearing John Paul's personal coat of arms and the date in Roman numerals. (Photo: Public Domain)

It was determined that four bullets struck the Pope (though sources vary), two in his abdomen and two in his left arm and hand. Two other bullets had gone into the crowd and injured two women, both of who would eventually recover. The Pope was rushed to the hospital and immediately went into surgery. Before being put under by anesthesia, a nurse quoted the Pope as saying “How could they have done this?” 

The surgery lasted about five-and-a-half hours, and surgeons were able to remove at least one of the bullets. Later, the doctors would say that the Pope was very lucky. While the injuries were serious, the bullets had missed vital organs and blood vessels. They would announce before the night was over that they were very hopeful that “the Pope will recover and stay with us.” 

Four days after the attempt on his life, the Pope made a public statement forgiving Agca and asking the world to pray for him.

Despite Agca’s affiliations and the handwritten note, there was no immediate agreement on why or who told him to shot the Pope. Agca certainly didn’t help the matter by constantly contradicting his own claims. At first, he said he acted by himself. Then, he claimed he was “the Messiah” and “Jesus reincarnated.” At some point, he said the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) put him up to it. He also perpetuated the “Bulgarian Connection theory” that the Bulgarian secret service, working in cahoots with the Soviet KGB, had paid him to shoot the Pope.  At one point, he even said he wanted to kill the King of England, but when he realized England only had a Queen he decided not to do it because “I am Turkish and a Moslem and I don't kill women.”

Detectives begun to believe that he was being coached and was making was making contradictory claims to throw investigators off the scent of his exact motives, whatever they were. The Italian press started “making confident assertions” that Agca’s attempt on the Pope’s life was part of a larger international conspiracy. Despite this, Italian authorities continued to maintain that there was no evidence to support that claim.  

Agca’s trial began in Italy on July 20^th, 1981, a little over two months after the incident. Two days later, he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. The short trial was proof to some of a true conspiracy that went beyond one man or even a small Turkish neo-fascist terrorist organization. 

Lenin Shipyard gate during the 1980 strike in Poland, decorated with a photograph of Pope John Paul II. (Photo: Zygmunt Błażek/CC BY-SA 3.0 pl) 

Many wondered which powerful organizations or countries might have a genuine grievance with the pope. The Soviets, for one, could not have been pleased with Karol Józef Wojtyła’s rise to the papacy in 1979. He was known throughout the world as pro-labor and anti-communist. When he made his first trip to his homeland of Poland as Pope John Paul II in June 1979 there was little doubt what was his intention was – to help undermine Communism. Upon his arrival and the mass excitement that accompanied it, it became clear to Pope John Paul II, according to his biographer George Weigel, that “Poland was not a communist country; Poland was a Catholic nation saddled with a communist state.”

All of this worried the Kremlin; to the point that it was not implausible to some that they would carry out a plan to assassinate the Pope. They had resorted to this type of tactic before in order to squash perceived threats to their regime. 25 years after the attempt on the Pope’s life, an independent Italian commission backed up this very claim. 

In 2006, that Italian commission released a report that concluded that, “beyond all reasonable doubt… the leaders of the USSR took the initiative to eliminate the Pope.” According to the report, the Soviets believed the Pope’s support of the democratic Solidarity Labor Movement in Poland was a threat to the USSR’s hold on the country. The report also detailed how the KGB planted bugs and moles in the Vatican. To many, this was proof of the “Bulgarian Connection theory” – that the Soviets had asked the Bulgarian Secret Service to find someone to shot the Pope. Knowing his past, they choose Agca and paid him handsomely. Still, American historians and former CIA ops have claimed the report is based on false informationand they firmly believe that Agca’s actions were not part of a greater conspiracy. To this day, no one can agree on the truth behind why Agca shot the Pope. 

Pope John Paul II meeting with Mehmet Ali Agca in his jail cell in Rome. (Photo: Flickr CC)

In December of 1983, Pope John Paul II visited Agca in his prison cell and forgave him. This meeting was immortalized on the cover of Time Magazine. Thanks to this meeting and a clemency granted  by Italy’s President, Agca was released from prison in 2010. In December of 2014, when St. Peters Square was full of holiday pilgrims, Agca showed up to the Vatican to lay flowers at the grave of Pope John Paul II, who had died in 2005. 

After passing through metal detectors and placing a bouquet of white roses at the tomb, Agca was detained for illegally entering Italy. Bizarrely, he also requested an audience with the current Pope, Pope Francis, to which the Vatican spokesmen replied, “He has put his flowers on John Paul’s tomb; I think that is enough.”

After this incident, Mehmet Ali Agca was sent back to Turkey, where he lives today, presumably in hiding. He hasn’t commented on his motives or the circumstances around his attack in years. To this day, the bizarre mystery of who backed the would-be murderer of Pope John Paul II 34 years ago has yet to be solved.  

The Andean cat (Photo: CONAF/Andean Cat Alliance)

Earlier this month, rangers looking through footage from camera traps in a Chilean nature reserve encountered a surprise sight: an Andean cat and her kitten, the Dodo reports. This cat is so rare that not only had it never been seen in this part of Chile, it had only ever been observed in the wild a few times. 

The small, gray and fuzzy Andean cat (Leopardus jacobita) has always been elusive—so much so that until the last decade, scientists weren't sure whether it was an endangered species or just living far from human eyes. (It's endangered, it turns out.) Before 1998, Andean cats had only been photographed twice. It's thought that they live mostly above the timberline in the Andes (although one population was found a few years ago lower down in the mountains). 

Another! (Photo: CONAF/Andean Cat Alliance)

This month, the cat and kitten above were photographed in Chile's Los Flamencos National Reserve. The reserve is in the the northern part of the country; the photographs indicate that the cats have a wider range than anyone knew. There are only about 2,500 Andean cats in the entire world, so any evidence of their survival is pretty incredible.

Coming into the light (Photo: CONAF/Andean Cat Alliance)

Bonus finds: 4-million-year-old whale fossils, a tomato shaped like a duck.

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

Perhaps this boy is headed to church? (Photo: Tauno Tõhk / 陶诺 /flickr)

Xiao Xue is a young woman from the countryside in Henan Province, central China. Ten years ago, she migrated to the city of Tianjin to work as a helper for, full disclosure, my grandmother. Xiao Xue and her mother are both Christians, and when Xue left home, she got into the habit of always taking her Bible with her. 

In every village, she said, there’s a small church with an altar and a cross. The local government provided money to build a beautiful church in the town near her village, big enough to hold over 1,000 people. She attended service here on Sundays, and it was always packed, with people squeezed onto benches and sitting on the floor against the walls. In the services, there are sermons, songs by the congregation, and testimonials by parishioners about how Jesus has helped them. At noon, the church provides everyone with a hearty free lunch—bowls of pork noodles and thick, white buns called mantou. The younger churchgoers serve the elders and clear up afterwards, contributing to what Xue described as an atmosphere full of love and respect.

After working in the city for several years, Xue returned home and visited her church. At the church service, she was able to make a 200RMB ($30) contribution when the donation box came around—the beginning, she decided, of a lifelong tradition.

It's a choice that a historic number of people in China are making. In the countryside, Christianity seems to be filling a spiritual void, building a greater sense of community, and often providing a local financial boost. It feels more complicated in cities, where many see the religious rush closely interwoven with chaotic urbanization and a rise in materialism. You’ll hear lamentations from Chinese about how there is no ideology, no morality, no spirituality anymore, with some seeking Christianity for some kind of balance, and others associating it with the West and seeing it as an enabler of greater material wealth.

Some say that what’s happening spiritually in China is “nothing short of remarkable.” One scholar calls this religious revival “one of the greatest awakenings in human history.” 

So is China’s changing religious landscape a “spiritual crisis,” as some have said, or a spiritual miracle? 

Perhaps it is both.

China's churches don't look like this... yet. (Photo: Michael D Beckwith/flickr)

After years of religious repression in first half of the 20th century, churches began sprouting up again over the past few decades, while traveling evangelists baptized Chinese villagers in rivers, in the trunks of trucks, in moldy showers.  By the 1990s, as millions of Chinese went to cities in search of work, and thousands of missionaries migrated to China from abroad, Christianity in China began to take on a life of its own.

The last decade or so in China has been host to a religious fervor unlike anything we’ve seen before. Though traditional Buddhism still draws the most followers (18 percent, or 244 million people), in the last few decades the number of Catholics and Protestants has grown to an estimated 9 million and 58 million people, respectively. Fenggang Yang, director of the Center of Religion and Chinese Society at Purdue University, predicts that by 2030, Christians will represent 16 percent of China’s population.

In parts of the Chinese countryside, Christians already make up 70 or 80 percent of the population, says Xue.

China is one of only two societies where religion was once absent; the other is Albania under Communist rule, according to Yang. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) remains the largest explicitly atheist organization in the world. From 1966 to 1979, religion had been completely illegal; students were taught the Marxist ideology that religion is the opium of the weak and oppressed. Children were told that God was dead and religion gone, and they grew up worshiping Chairman Mao instead. Temples and churches were nowhere to be found. 

Now, the country is suddenly en route to hosting the biggest Christian community in the world, with Bibles finally available on some store shelves and churches shooting up across the country. And outside the city circles of urban and educated Chinese, beyond the close watch of the Communist Party, Christianity is thriving. Where the miracle began, the miracle continues. 

(Images: Center on Religion and Chinese Society, Purdue University)

The legalities of Christianity in China remain somewhat murky. When Jimmy Carter met with leader Deng Xiaoping in 1979, he asked for three things: for China to allow Christian churches, publication of the Bible, and missionaries. That year, the CCP had just announced that nationals could subscribe to one of the five state-authorized churches—Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Catholicism, and Christianity (Protestantism)—but only those. 

After sleeping on it, Deng said yes to the first and second requests, and no to the third. It soon became evident that those were very tenuous “yes”s.

As far as churches go, Carter would be pleased to see that you can find them far and wide, though he might be miffed at their strict regulation. According to the law, Chinese are only allowed to attend official state-run churches, known as Three Self Churches, which technically represent “self-governance, self-support, and self propagation.” (At state-authorized foreign churches, passports are checked at the door, and Chinese nationals are turned away.) These churches receive regulation and oversight from Party officials to ensure they are not going astray in their messages to the masses (they often hold upwards of 5,000 people). Churches unauthorized by the government have had their their crosses knocked down and their buildings closed and sometimes demolished. Prominent Christian pastors have even been sentenced to years in prison. But much of this is concentrated in certain regions—the highly Christian and urbanized regions of Zhejiang and Wenzhou.

Some folks see this as an intrusive extension of the Party and instead join underground “house churches,” which are (illegal) congregational gatherings that take place in apartments or empty buildings or even outside in the snow. House churches refuse to accept oversight by any official authority, and when discovered, members have suffered.

Yet despite the obstacles, there's still a lot of unbounded optimism. The American-run ministry Project China states on its website, "We want to put a church within reach of every Chinese person."

House churches—halt! (Photo: Beijing Patrol/flickr)

And what about bibles? Well, owning a bible luckily no longer gets you into trouble in China. That said, there have still been occasional bible-related arrests. Bibles were once very difficult to lay hands on, and previously, they were smuggled into China by the ton. Until 2013, bibles could be distributed only through official Three Self churches, but recently, they finally starting showing up on commercial shelves, though the hundreds of millions of copies now circulating still struggle to keep up with demand. All that said, these days in China, you can get your hands on just about anything—whether it’s a bible or Fifty Shades of Grey.

Carter's final request still lags behind the rest of official religious freedom policy. Proselytizing is rampant, yet illegal, and missionaries have been arrested in increasing numbers over the last couple years. If you Google missionaries in China, the headline “China broadens crackdown on foreign missionaries” shows up right above a link to “Become a Missionary to China.” Most come from America and South Korea registered as English teachers, and if you travel to rural China, you’ll quickly develop a missionary radar. 

 Perhaps no phenomenon better shows the rise of Chinese Christianity than the explosion in reports of the ultimate conversion moment: miracles. These reports emerged from the countryside in the 1970s and 1980s, spurred by failing healthcare and the hope that Christianity could help heal wounds. In rural Zhejiang, Anhui, and Hebei, preachings of the word of were God followed by healings and inexplicable phenomena—the handicapped suddenly walking, the blind gaining sight, the dead being raised. 

Examples abound. Once, when a woman entered a house meeting possessed by a demon, a Christian put his hands on her shoulders and began speaking in tongues; minutes later, she fell to the ground and reawakened, her normal self. In another case, a group of thugs was so stunned by witnessing Evangelist prayer cure the deaf and the paralyzed, that they immediately embraced Jesus. Another story tells of a woman persecuted for her Christian faith hearing that her son had fallen into a well. While the villagers gathered around, the boy rose to the surface of the water. He told them that a man in white had been holding him up. These kinds of stories are now commonplace. 

The Party still pushes a slogan from the 1920s: “One more Christian, one fewer Chinese.” But the tide has turned away from Communist party zeal. China may well experience more miracles than any country on Earth right now, something that can only spur more young people like Xue to keep a small, sacred book tucked into their bag at all times. It might even have a red cover.  

The sky above this river never sleeps. Producing 3,600 flashes per hour, for 10 hours at a time, for most nights out of the year, the "Relampago del Catatumbo," has been raging, on and off, for as long as people can remember.

It was recently inducted into the Guinness Book of World Records, as the place in the world with the most lighting strikes per square meter, taking the record from the town of Kikika in the Democratic Republic of Congo. All of which points to the fact that while unusual, the "Relampago del Catatumbo" is certainly not the only storm nursery in the world, just the flashiest.  

Making the mysteries of the Mysteries of the Unknown known. (Image: Youtube)

Turn on just about any channel of American TV between 1987 and 1991, and there was a pretty good chance you would be treated to strange tales of spontaneous psychic connections that were “DISMISSED AS COINCIDENCE." Or a normal-looking guy talking about a magician’s honeymoon in the Great Pyramid, before harping on his friend to “Read the book!” You might even see a young Julianne Moore telling a story about an out-of-body experience.

These were all commercials for Time-Life’s Mysteries of the Unknown series, a mail order book series that not only blanketed the airwaves with unforgettable commercials, but captured the zeitgeist of a burgeoning New Age explosion. The book series was a collection of thin, black volumes that delved into every corner of the mystical, metaphysical, and paranormal. But for all of their admirably in-depth explorations of everything from “Earth Energies” to “Mysterious Creatures,” one mystery remains: how did they get so popular?

Fittingly enough, it may have just been fated in the stars.

The Mysteries of the Unknown phenomenon began in 1987 when Time-Life Books began to test the waters for a series of books on the paranormal. Time-Life Books, a conglomeration of the two titular magazines, sold books via monthly subscriptions. Their series and titles usually focused on broad historical or utilitarian subjects like The Old West or Home Repair and Improvement, and were mainly sold directly to the consumer via television ads that blanketed the cable and broadcast airwaves. They were the kinds of books one’s dad or grandparents might buy.

This is the televised version of a pop-up ad. (Image: Youtube)

Even within Time-Life, the series was nicknamed, “books as furniture," says Tom Corry, former Product Manager for Time-Life Books, who helped develop the paranormal series and the ad campaign that saw it take off. According to Corry, who is now CEO of his own company, Healthcare Data Insights & Analytics, the roots of the Mysteries series are actually pretty mundane. “We already had a book series called the Enchanted World, and it was elves and fairies,” he says. “It was a pretty popular series.” Having found an audience for these books, Time-Life decided to see what other left-field topics readers might be interested in.

Moving a bit away from the myth and folklore of the Enchanted World, Time-Life began polling its marketing database to see if they could get a little more mysterious and metaphysical. The database was a collection of people who had filled out business reply cards (the company tip emails of the day), or purchased previous series from Time-Life. They responded with "decent interest," says Corry. "We thought we could probably squeeze a series out of this."

The art collected for the series put OMNI Magazine to shame. (Image: Youtube)

But the Time-Life editors weren’t that interested in the idea of this comparatively out-there new series. “Oh yeah. They hated that stuff,” says Corry. Time-Life had made its reputation on sober publications like This Fabulous Century and The Life Nature Library, so runs like the Enchanted World and Mysteries of the Unknown were far more fringe. But the customer interest was strong enough, and the sales projections made sense, so the project went through. While it may have lacked very much magic in its conception, Mysteries of the Unknown was about to beguile America.

The series debuted via Time-Life’s direct mail campaigns in early 1987, receiving, as Corry puts it, a “mediocre” response. But then came the Harmonic Convergence, a global meditation event organized by New Age author José Argüelles, that called for believers from all around the world to gather where they could in order to meditate on a common karmic goal. According to Argüelles, on August 16-17 of 1987, the planets aligned as predicted in an ancient Mayan prophecy, ushering in an age of global rebirth.

Who knows what effect the Harmonic Convergence of 1987 had on the karma of the planet, but the massive popularity of the event certainly marked a turning point in the sales of Mysteries of the Unknown. “There was the Harmonic Convergence, and then there was the power of crystals.” Corry says. “All this stuff out in the news, and out in the market, starts hitting on the Harmonic Convergence, and crystals, and out-of-body experiences. UFOs were kind of big ... Right after that, in the fall of ‘87, we couldn’t print enough books.” 

The ad that started it all.

While a seemingly cosmic synchronicity may have kicked off the series’ popularity, it was the TV ads that made Mysteries of the Unknown immortal. After the standard promotion cycle of direct mailings, followed by print advertising and reply cards, the first Mysteries of the Unknown television commercial hit the airwaves in September of 1987.

Developed by advertising agency Wunderman Worldwide, the ad had an ominous voiceover presenting the viewer with a series of seemingly unexplainable events, against a sinister John-Carpenter-lite soundtrack. “Northern Texas. An unidentified flying object is reported by at least a dozen people,” the voiceover intoned. “Although there were no storms in the area, it’s dismissed as lightning.” Then, during the same ad, came the image of a man who brought a coat hanger bent into the shape of an ankh to Stonehenge, getting zapped with a surge of yellow “power.”

These eerie/silly advertisements hit like a psychic blast, and Mysteries of the Unknown was on its way to breaking every sales record Time-Life had ever seen at the time. A New York Times article from 1988 reports 700,000 orders for the first book in the series, Mystic Places.

As sales of the series stayed strong, more commercials followed over the next few years. Initially mimicking the creepy voiceover formula of the original, the ads moved towards a more personal perspective. They began with dramatizations of people telling their unexplainable stories (Hey there, 1989 Julianne Moore!), before juxtaposing them with a grumpy skeptic. Later in the life of the campaign, the ads got even more elaborate, with one in 1990 promising to send subscribers “power crystals” if they drew a full moon over an image of Stonehenge printed on a mail-in reply card.

Ladies and gentlemen, future Oscar-winner Julianne Moore.

Perhaps the most iconic of the ads were the ones that spotlighted a conversation between an incredulous disbeliever and a Mysteries of the Unknown subscriber. One classic exchange:

Man 1: Mystic Places?

Man 2: It talks about the Nazca Lines being runways for alien spaceships, and aliens interbreeding with ancient Peruvians.

Man 1: Did they?

Man 2: Read the book. Read about Aleister Crowley and his bride’s honeymoon night in the Great Pyramid.

Man 1: What happened?!

Man 2: Read the book!

“Read the book!” became a favorite catchphrase as people were bombarded with commercials for the series on every 1990s powerhouse network, from MTV to TNT to Nickelodeon.

"READ THE BOOK!!!"

While the ads capitalized on the skepticism surrounding the subject matter, the books themselves were much less flighty than one might expect. The researchers, writers, and editors at Time-Life who worked on the series subjected titles like Psychic Voyages and Spirit Summonings to the same rigors of investigation and annotation as any of their historical titles.

“One thing I have to say about Time-Life is that it was really well researched,” Corry says, “because the guys in New York, the chairman of the board of Time Inc., they had a real focus on editorial excellence.” The volume entitled Ancient Wisdom and Secret Sects alone has a bibliography that references about 178 different sources. The book itself is only 176 pages long. No matter how skeptical one might be, it certainly seemed like the books got as close to the bottom of their mysteries as they could. Although, according to Corry, the editors never really did warm to the subject matter.

When Mysteries of the Unknown was initially released in 1987, there were only 20 volumes in the series. By 1991, when the series was finally discontinued, it had grown to encompass 33 titles, including Cosmic Connections, Witches and Witchcraft, and The Mind and Beyond. The true hidden powers behind the Mysteries of the Unknown were sales figures, and as those slowed, the series ended.

The interior of Ancient Wisdom and Secret Sects (Image by Eric Grundhauser) 

Mysteries of the Unknown lives on most indelibly in the minds of those that were hypnotized by the unforgettable ads (Corry won a Cleo for one of the TV spots, and credits the series for defining his marketing career). Time-Life Books was shut down in 2003, and the company now focuses on selling multimedia things like DVDs and CDs. No mention of the Mysteries of the Unknown series can be found on its website, but copies of the thin black tomes still pop up on eBay, Amazon, and the shelves of used book stores. Physical copies of the books now seem like mysterious artifacts themselves: half-remembered grimoires filled with the hottest timeless mysteries of the 1980s and '90s.

A glimpse of WWII Poland. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons) 

During World War II, a man went to the doctor in Rozwadów, Poland with a unique complaint. He was one of thousands of Poles forced by the Nazi occupiers to work in German labor camps. The man had been granted a 14-day leave to visit his family, and his time was almost up. 

He was desperate to escape the camp, but knew that if he did not return, he would be hunted down and he and his family would be arrested and sent to a concentration camp–a death sentence in many cases. He had considered suicide, but also knew that a serious disease, verified by a physician, would spare him from returning to the camp. 

The two doctors who saw the man decided to help him in his quest for a diagnosis, and offered to give him aninjection. He accepted. The doctors then drew a blood sample and sent it to a German lab. Soon, they received a telegram that read: “Weil-Felix positive.” Their patient had tested positive for typhus. The telegram was given to the local German authorities as proof that the patient had an infectious disease, and the man was subsequently released from his duties at the camp. He was also excluded from future detention, as were any family members he had come in contact with. 

The doctors did not actually make their patient sick, of course. That would be unthinkable to them, even in the most dire circumstances. The typhus epidemic that they brought to Rozwadów was instead their own unique spin on “faking sick,” a concocted outbreak meant to shield their patients and neighbors from persecution. The doctors had saved the man's life by giving him a simulacrum of the disease, and by giving the same shot to many others in the area, they would save thousands more. 

Doctors injected Polish men with a fake disease that tricked German officers into believe they were infected with typhus. (Photo: BlueGoaॐ☮/flickr)

One of the doctors, Eugene Lazowski, was already an old hand at defying the Nazis when the ruse began. During the German occupation of Poland, around one-fifth of the country’s population was killed in mass executions and concentration camps. Polish physicians, Lazowski said, were “confronted with a special task–not only to prevent diseases and treat sick people, but also to defend their lives and those of their countrymen.” 

Lazowski began waging what he called a “private war” against the occupiers. After escaping a German POW camp by scaling the wall and riding off on an unattended horse cart, he went back to his home in Rozwadów and worked for the Polish Red Cross. His house backed up against the fence that separated the Jewish ghetto from the rest of the city. Conditions in the ghetto allowed diseases to run rampant, but the doctor was forbidden from treating any Jews, so hearranged a covert way of helping them. When someone in the ghetto was ill, they would tie a rag to the fence, and Lazowski would sneak in at night to bring medical supplies and treat the sick. To keep the Nazis from catching on, hefudged his records and exaggerated the amount of supplies and medicine that he used on his non-Jewish patients. 

Lazowski’s friend Stanislaw Matulewicz also practiced medicine in Rozwadów, and a chance discovery allowed the pair to protect even more people by playing on the Nazis fears of contamination. After typhus wreaked havoc in the trenches during World War I, the Nazis were terrified of possible outbreaks among their soldiers. German authorities in Poland required doctors to report all suspected and confirmed cases of typhus to them and send blood samples to German-controlled labs for testing. Poles with the disease were quarantined and spared detention in the labor camps, but infected Jews were executed. 

“When many cases were reported from an area, it was declared by the German Public Health Authority to be an ‘epidemic area,’” the two doctorswrote after the war. “This situation produced some advantages for the people, because the Germans were inclined to avoid such territories and the population was relatively free from atrocities.” 

A glimpse into Rozwadów, Poland today. (Photo: Krzysztof Dobrzański/Wikimedia Commons)

The most common test for typhus at the time was the Weil-Felix test, based on 1916 research showing that antibodies produced by the immune system in response to a typhus infection also react to Proteus OX-19, a strain of bacteria known for causing urinary tract infections. For the Weil-Felix test, dead Proteus OX-19 bacteria is mixed with a blood sample from a patient. If the mixture becomes cloudy, it’s clear sign of typhus. 

While learning to administer the test on his own so he could bypass the German labs and keep any typhus infections among his Jewish patients secret, Matulewicz figured out that a person injected with the same dead bacteria would produce the same antibodies, yielding a false-positive test result for typhus. “It immediately became clear that the artificial Weil-Felix could be used as a form of defense against the policies of the German occupation government,” Lazowski later explained.  

He suggested that they use doctored tests and false-positive results to create a typhus “epidemic” in and around Rozwadów to keep the Germans away. Starting with the laborer on leave, they began giving any non-Jewish patients with symptoms resembling the early stages of typhus, such as fever, cough, rash, and aches, injections of dead Proteus OX-19 under the guise of “protein stimulation therapy.” 

The doctors worked in secret and didn’t even tell their patients what they were doing, and only revealed their scheme to the world in 1977 in an article for the American Society for Microbiology’s newsletter. They were also careful to mimic the ebb and flow of real epidemics, giving more injections and creating more “typhus” cases in the winter and fall. To throw the authorities off, they referred some of their injected patients to other doctors, who would diagnose and report the typhus infections on their own.

“More and more positive Weil-Felix reactions were reported by German-controlled laboratories to German authorities and confirmed by our reports,” the doctors wrote. “Soon the number of reported cases was sufficiently large to declare the area of our practice (about a dozen villages) an ‘epidemic area,’ with relative freedom from oppression.”

A World War II Nazi officer takes a break for lunch. (Photo: Marion Doss/flickr)

The doctors’ lies were almost revealed by the lack of deaths. With a typhus epidemic supposedly raging in the Rozwadów area, the Nazis began to wonder why more people weren’t dying there, and an informant suggested that the outbreak was not what it appeared to be. A team of German doctors was sent to the town to investigate.

Lazowski greeted the visitors with a spread of Polish foods and vodkas. While the senior German doctors sat down to the feast, their underlings toured the town with the doctor. Before their visit, Lazowski had gathered his most unhealthy-looking patients, all of whom had been injected with Proteus bacteria, together in a dirty room. Scared of infection, the young doctors gave the building and patients that Lazowski showed them only a cursory glance. After doing a few blood tests to confirm the epidemic, they quickly left. Their supervisors presumably enjoyed the vodka enough not to double-check. 

The quarantined area that Lazowski and Matulewicz created became a haven for Polish Jews, who could hide in Rozwadów under the cover of the fake epidemic without fear of the Nazis discovering them. All told, the doctors saved an estimated 8,000 people from being killed or imprisoned during their three-year campaign with the help of a UTI-causing bacterium, proving that sometimes the syringe is mightier than the sword. 

What's inside? (Photo: Junk Food Living/Flickr)

On a Friday night, Mike Vegas, a bartender in California, ordered from Domino's—pizza and wings for dinner. He accepted the delivery, ate a slice of pizza, and put the rest in the fridge for safekeeping, he told ABC7. After a long night at work, he came home and, at 5 a.m., opened the box of wings. But instead of food, he found this:

The two bundles of cash added up to $1,300. The delivery person had put the money in the box for safekeeping, only to accidentally hand it to Vegas. "I wanted to keep it, believe me," he told ABC7. "But I can't, I can't do that." 

With a news crew in tow, he returned the money to the Domino's branch. On camera, the shop's general manager promised that Vegas would get free pizza—for an entire year. 

Bonus finds: The tomb of the Maccabees (maybe), 70,000 fake Qurans

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

Getting struck by lightning seems like a one-in-a-million occurrence (it’s actually more like 1/12,000), even for a lightning photographer. But the much more common occurrence of lightning striking the ocean can be just as damaging, as photographer Brian Skinner recently found out.

While taking photos of a storm off the coast of Newcastle, Australia, Skinner was the victim of a second hand shock. The tripod of his camera happened to be touching the wet sands just at the edge of the lapping surf when lightning struck the water off in the distance. At that exact moment Skinner was fiddling with the exposure for his shot, but the electricity from the strike traveled through the water, up his camera, and right into his hand. The moment that Skinner got struck was captured on video, and in it, you can see him jumping back from the shock.

The moment Skinner was shocked. (Image: Youtube)

Skinner, who has been photographing storms for over 25 years, walked away relatively unscathed. According to the Daily Mail, when he pulled his hand away from the camera it was completely blackened, but after seeing a doctor, it turned out that he simply had a number of bruises. Skinner credits his survival to a gold ring he was wearing, which was bent by the force of the shock.

The transferred shock is a testament to the massive amount of power contained in a single lightning strike, but if Skinner is to be believed, it gave him more than just a jolt. As he continued to tell the Daily Mail, for a time after the incident, he gained limited super powers including clairvoyance and enhanced strength. The powers supposedly dissipated as the energy left his body. Now the only miracle left is his survival.

The fruit in question (Photo: Screenshot via KAKE-TV)

In Winfield, Kansas, one community gardener planted cherry tomatoes in her garden, and, as the season progressed was surprised to see one of the bulbous fruits grow…and grow…and grow. It was yellow and much larger than any cherry tomato had the right to be. So the gardener, Sherri Miller, started wondering what it might be. 

She and the other gardeners started speculating. The vine the fruit grew on had tomatoes at its end, but the plot also contained watermelons. Maybe the mystery fruit was cross-bred?

When the local news crew showed its video to an agricultural specialist, though, a more likely explanation emerged: this supposed tomato was actually an eggplant. Like tomatoes, eggplants are part of the nightshade family.  How one ended up on a tomato vine, though, is still a mystery.

Bonus finds: Alaskan dinosaur, early evidence of salmon dinner

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

Workers drilling a well in Shanghai, China a few weeks ago noticed a miraculous sight: fire dancing on the surface of the well water.

The water, bubbling up from 200 feet underground, was ignited when a worker tried to light a cigarette.

This effect is beautiful and harmless, but it's related to a more sinister phenomenon that made the news in the U.S. a few years ago. Fracking wells, used to dredge up natural gas from underground, were tainting drinking water sources in Texas and Pennsylvania with flammable methane. When you turned on a tap and sparked a lighter, the stream of water would flare up. 

Unlike fracking wells, which force water and chemicals into bedrock at high pressures to release and collect the natural gas, the Shanghai well hit natural gas accidentally. According to an expert, there are only trace amounts of gas in the water, enough for a light show but not enough to put the well in danger of exploding. The water will stop burning once the gas source is exhausted, and presumably be safe to drink—if perhaps a little charred-tasting. 

A still from "Flower Magic," a recent Miracle-Gro ad. (Image: Miracle Gro/YouTube)

Wander through the gardening section of pretty much any department store and you'll see the same color combo lining packages along the aisle: green, yellow and black. Inside these distinctive bags, boxes, and bottles are the magical blue-green crystals that put Demeter-like powers within reach of anyone with a foot of dirt to spare. Miracle-Gro.

What is Miracle-Gro? For hobbyist gardeners, it's a failsafe, promising an extra boost to homegrown tomatoes and container blossoms. For middle-school botanists, it's doubly heaven-sent, providing visibly larger plants and a very reliable science fair project. For advertisers, it's something else entirely—one of the first examples of how a couple of Americans, buoyed by a slogan, a dream, and a workable product, made a whole lot of something out of almost nothing. 

But first, Otto Stern had to escape Nazi Germany. Stern, a German Jew, had been arrested during Kristallnacht, deserted by his non-Jewish wife, and imprisoned in a concentration camp. He held on, dreaming of a post-war life. When he was released from the camps after Hitler's downfall, he left Germany, bouncing from Cuba to America and finally ending up in Geneva, New York. If Gloversville was a glove town, and Danbury a hat city, Geneva was (and is) a plant capital, home to federal and state agricultural agencies, and a capitalist Eden of for-sale trees, flowers and other green stuff. There, Stern began to grow a new life for himself, starting up his own nursery and setting it apart with what was then a novel idea: order from his shop, and he would ship the plants anywhere in the country. You could come home to find a rosebush waiting for you on your porch. 

Stern and his staff, at his nursery office in Geneva in 1944. Stern is in the back near the stovepipe. (Photo: Geneva Historical Society/Public Domain)

There was just one problem—said rosebush, having gone through the mail, was a little worse for wear. So in the late 1940s, Stern began selling Ra-Pid-Gro fertilizer alongside his plants as a pick-me-up. It sold so well that he shortly started rethinking his product line. Unbeknownst to him, his business plan was about to get its own shot of phosphorus, thanks to an up-and-coming huckster named Horace Hagedorn.

In 1950, Hagedorn was drumming his fingers as the suburban outpost guy for a small Manhattan firm. He had gotten his start selling radio ads during the Great Depression, and lived by an advertising maxim he'd learned from Martin Small, the inventor of roll-on deodorant: "Find a need, and fill it." Hagedorn had watched his friends and neighbors move into post-war subdivisions and start caring about their lawns, windowboxes, and backyard gardens—which didn't mean they were any good at actually taking care of them. Hagedorn himself couldn't get his tomatoes as big as he wanted them.

Current Miracle-Gro headquarters, now located in Marysville, Ohio. (Photo: Wiki Historian N OH/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

To get a nationwide customer base, Stern advertised in national daily papers and on the radio. One day, in pursuit of top-notch placement, he ended up in Hagedorn's office. Stern and Hagedorn's professional relationship involved a lot of in-person visits—Stern didn't like to talk on the phone, because it garbled his thick German accent into incoherence—and a lot of opportunities to shoot the breeze about the plant biz. Stern confirmed Hagedorn's suspicion that there was a distinct and fillable need for products that helped de-mystify the garden. Not too long after their first meeting, Stern's Ra-Pid-Gro supplier dumped him, giving him the push he needed. The next time he walked into Hagedorn's office, it wasn't to buy an ad, but to start a fertilizer company. 

Stern and Hagedorn each put $2000 into this side project. They outsourced the product design to Professor O. Wesley Davidson, an orchid expert who had lived, breathed and slept plant care since his freshman year at Rutgers University. Many years and several degrees later, he was still there, chairing the floriculture department. Davidson came up with a fertilizer formulation consisting of 15 percent nitrogen, 30 percent phosphorus, and 15 percent phosphate, for leaf growth and greenness, root strength, and overall metabolic health. The blue-green crystals could be stored and shipped dry, and were reactivated by water, like some sort of magic dust. They worked well, though, handled directly, the stuff would turn not just your thumb, but your entire hand, green. Hagedorn's wife Peggy suggested a name—Miracle-Gro, a perfect blend of old-style sincerity and futuristic, convenience-promising abbreviation.

Someone has big plans. (Photo: Crinklecrankle.com/Flickr)

They were in business. In 1951, Hagedorn took some amount of the startup money—whether it was just his half or the whole caboodle is disputed—and used it to buy a full-page ad in the New York Herald-Tribune. According to the Hagedorn Foundation, it was “sprinkled with scientific phrases about things like radioactive isotopes." The ad grabbed them $22,000 in sales, and Hagedorn carried a wrinkled copy of it around in his suit pocket for decades.

Starting then, the business outsourced most of its physical responsibilities, from manufacturing through distribution, to outside vendors. Hagedorn and Stern focused solely on getting the word out. The partners traveled from hardware store to hardware store, buttering up the managers and furnishing the product and displays for free, asking only to be paid back the take at the end of the month. They commissioned ads by Joseph Csatari, who had worked with Norman Rockwell, and tapped into that same all-Americana sensibility for a series of Miracle-Gro masterworks, which featured happy families at all stages of life puttering around their gardens. In the 1960s, their new slogan managed to turn hippie lingo charmingly stodgy, suggesting that everyone "discover the power of flowers."

A still from an advertisement for Miracle-Gro Moisture Control Potting Mix. The line of products now has many new ways in which it can trounce the competition during commercials. (Screencap: Miracle-Gro/ispot.tv)

When TV became big in the 1970s, the duo got on board: Hagedorn acted as product spokesman, filming an ad in Death Valley that promised if he could grow a garden there, viewers could grow one anywhere. Hagedorn believed his hair was not thick or lush enough to inspire the appropriate confidence, so he donned a toupee for the shoot. Sadly, it was still not enough—in fact, sales went down in areas where the ad aired. In response, the duo hired a professional host, James Whitmore, leaving Hagedorn the kind of backseat driver who yells things like "bite into the tomato!" They even offered huge cash prizes (and huge plastic replicas) to anyone who could grow world-record vegetables, provided they used a certain product.

This strategy made Miracle-Gro one of the first companies to embrace a very contemporary business model, in which the brand is more important than the product itself—an observation Hagedorn's son James made in his father's New York Times obituary. "Horace turned nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus into an emotional experience," writes Adam Hanft in an Inc.com profile. As the company expanded, kudzu-like, into more and more of the home fertilizer market, "Miracle-Gro" became a shorthand for a quick boost, showing up everywhere from dating advice columns to federal courtrooms. Other companies put the stuff in their advertisements. 

Celebrate the first day of spring by planting in the world’s first #Springmoji garden! pic.twitter.com/Z6YlPUImms

— Miracle-Gro (@MiracleGro) March 20, 2015

Hagedorn bought out Stern's share in the mid-80s, merged Miracle-Gro Products, Inc. with lawn care company Scotts Co. in 1995, took up philanthropy, and died 10 years later. His son James now runs the whole thing. The product line has expanded apace—they sell everything from seeds to sunlamps—and their advertising machine has chugged gracefully into the new millennium, targeting young people and city slickers, moving into hydroponics, and sponsoring "the world's biggest crowdsourced emoji garden."

Meanwhile, research suggests that pumping excess nitrogen into the soil leads to algal blooms, excess ozone, and other forms of nutrient pollution. Scotts Miracle-Gro has been on the wrong end of a number of lawsuits after selling bird food tainted with unregistered pesticides, and they're in bed with Monsanto, leading many organic websites to host their own versions of that classic middle school science fair plant competition, with Miracle-Gro in the losing spot. The new CEO makes headlines for swearing too much. 

Maybe this symbolic downfall was inevitable. In an age of environmental reckoning, the whole Miracle-Gro M.O.—that you can sprinkle blue crystals on your plants and watch them plump up, guilt-free—doesn't really ring true anymore. Just as Stern and Hagedorn made their way in a changing era, it may be time for some other American dreamers to strap on their gardening gloves and turn over a new leaf. 

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.