In a little more than a week, the longest and deepest tunnel of its kind will open to trains.
The Gotthard Base Tunnel, in southern Switzerland, cuts through 35.5 miles of the Swiss Alps, and, after 17 years, $12 billion, eight deaths, and 31 million tons of displaced rock, is set to open on June 1, according to NBC News.
The tunnel will not begin carrying passengers until December, however, after a period of testing. But when it's fully operational, according to NBC News, it will cut travel time from Zurich to Milan nearly in a half, from over four hours to around 2.5 hours.
That's in part because the tunnel will have fewer ups and downs, meaning it will be flatter than current routes, allowing for trains to travel faster—to speeds of up to 155 mph.
The tunnel will be a little over four miles longer than the famous Channel Tunnel, or Chunnel, which connects France and England.
And like the Chunnel, the Gotthard Base Tunnel comprises two tunnels for trains, one for each direction. The amount of rock displaced in building the new tunnel through the Alps was enough to build five Egyptian Giza pyramids.
"The communities at either end have been living with the construction for a whole generation so this is an exciting moment for them, too," Claire Smith, an engineer and editor, told NBC News. "It's been a big part of their lives for a long time."
A very, very old beer recipe has been discovered in China, and it is notable for its use of barley, which scientists had previously thought ancient Chinese did not have access to, according to a paper published Monday.
But let's get to the important part first. How did it taste? "A bit sour and a bit sweet," Jiajing Wang, the researcher leading the study, told NPR.
In other words: drinkable enough. Its ingredients? Barley, Job's tears, broomcorn millet, and tubers, which were fermented in subterranean rooms, sometime between 3400 B.C. and 2900 B.C., in central China.
How was it brewed? Probably in very similar ways as we make beer today, Patrick McGovern, a biomolecular archaeologist and the so-called "Indiana Jones" of ancient beer, told NPR. That would include stringent controls on temperature—the Chinese brewery was underground, likely to keep conditions cool.
Researchers also found tools that may not be out of place in a brewery today: a stove, a funnel, lots of jugs.
The finding was also significant, the researchers said, because it shows that China had access to barley previously than initially thought. The grain is now common across the country.
"Our findings imply that early beer making may have motivated the initial translocation of barley from Western Eurasia into the Central Plain of China before the crop became a part of agricultural subsistence in the region 3,000 years later," the researchers wrote.
The Chinese beer is among the earliest documented beers to have been produced. McGovern told NPR that they weren't the only ones, adding that, around the same time period, there's evidence of breweries in Iran and Egypt, in addition to winemaking in Armenia.
On this spring day, celebrity pet trainer Bash Dibra walks with Delilah (nickname: Dee) by his side. Once shy and skittish, the English sheepdog is basically strutting down the New York sidewalk.
Dibra and Dee are taking me to Canine Court, a space for dogs and owners that Dibra established in 1996 in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. It’s America’s first pet playground with an official city ordinance, different from your average dog park thanks to its agility components. This playground―which also has separate areas for different size dogs―encourages owners to play with their dogs rather than just watch them play with each other.
“It’s almost like an umbilical cord, you know?” says Dibra, describing the physical connection (leash) between dog and owner that then cements the emotional connection (love). “I try using the new technology of the millennium with people―hardwire, wireless, and content. I have all the content.” He laughs.
Dibra is one of the nation’s top pet trainers, with 40 years of dog expertise. He’s trained the dogs of A-listers like Jennifer Lopez, Martin Scorsese, Henry Kissinger, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Calvin Klein―or rather, he’s trained the humans themselves. “Everything’s the owner,” Dibra says. “It’s not the dog―I can make any dog do anything."
Dibra has worked with dogs and cats for television and film, he’s trained service and therapy dogs as well as prize-winning show dogs, he’s written books, given seminars and just about everything in between. For 15 years, he even raised an actual wolf.
As I lean down to give Dee a hug, Dee tells me that fascination with dogs began in a Yugoslav refugee camp. After escaping from communist Albania, he and his family were caught and thrown into the leftovers of a concentration camp. Dibra spent eight years in the camp, from age one to nine.
Dibra with Mariah the wolf and Dr. Marlin Perkins, zoologist and host of the TV show Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. (Photo: Bash Dibra)
Attack dogs patrolled the camp to ensure that no one escaped. As a child, Dibra was mesmerized by the furry creatures. Every day, he would go and pet them, no matter how much the guards yelled at him. Eventually, the guards gave up; they showed young Dibra all the things the dogs could do, and Dibra would mimic them. “That was my therapy,” says Dibra, who now lives in Riverdale, New York, a subway ride out of Manhattan. “That opened up a whole world.” And it’s been his world ever since.
I spot Delilah on the park poster as we walk in. There are three or four other dogs there, accompanied by their humans. Dibra demonstrates the agility features with Dee―a wooden frame, a tire, a tunnel, and a ramp. Dee makes them look easy, the result of patient repetition.
Dibra has owned many dogs over his lifetime. At one point, he had 12 dogs and 15 cats all at once. It doesn’t matter, he says, whether he’s got one dog like Dee or a dozen. Once they’re trained―on leash and then off―they all behave in unison, as if in a choreographed dance. He incentivizes dogs not with food but with praise, except when on set, like the times when he worked in Hollywood with the trainers of Lassie and Benji.
After leaving the camp, Dibra met dog trainers around Europe and then came to the U.S. to begin veterinary school at Cornell. But his father’s death led him to switch paths and go into animal behavior, a field that didn’t yet exist at the time. Back then, at Columbia University, they called the combined program “psychobiology.”
After completing his master’s degree, Dibra came into possession of Mariah, a six-day-old grey wolf born in captivity. Mariah became both his soulmate and his muse, teaching him much of what he knows about canines and primal drive. She became a goodwill ambassador, traveling the world to educate audiences on endangered species and ecosystems. But she was a 24-hour responsibility, and while Dibra socialized and developed her, he emphasizes that no one should own wild animals. He never wanted people to see Mariah and think of getting a wolf or tiger as a pet. In fact, he says, if you’re never had a pet, better to start small before getting anything too big.
A few owners slowly wander over towards Dibra and Dee, curious. Dibra briefly introduces himself, mentioning the free training sessions he hosts regularly at the park. One by one, he walks each owner through the basic training steps. “Bonding together with better training―that’s a good thought, right?” he asks. “Do this as much with him as you can.”
He guides each dog with the leash, congratulating her after she gets through the tunnel or over the ramp. Soon, every dog in the playground is trying her paw at the ramp, owner close by her side. “Praise her, praise her! Kiss her, hug her! Wonderful, wonderful!” Dibra says as he encourages everyone along, dog and owner alike. The dogs seem chipper, but it's the owners who really look newly animated after a few minutes with Dibra. They keep saying how they are going to come back and try it again.
At Canine Court, it's never long before Dibra is training owners alongside their dogs. (Photo: Tao Tao Holmes/Atlas Obscura)
An hour later, as we leave the playground, I ask Dibra why some people don’t seem to like dogs at all. He says they just haven’t had the pleasure of experiencing one. Recently, he tells me, he trained a billionaire client who’d never had a dog. She has all sorts of staff, but Dibra told her that she had to take care of the dog herself, instructing her on how to brush and bathe him.
“Even the royal power brokers of the world, I tell them, you gotta be there, and they show up,” says Dibra. “I won’t mention names―but they’ll show up, and they’ll tell everyone ‘I’m in a meeting,’ but they’re actually working with me.”
Now, his recent client says that when she’s afraid, the dog comes to sleep in her room. “Now she's like: how’d I miss this?”
Dibra tells me that his publisher has been asking him to write a book about his experience with celebrity clients and their dogs. Though he’d prefer to protect his clients, he says that after a while, he might be open to it. “There are so many stories―you won’t believe me! Oh my god. And people, and human nature!” He cracks a huge smile. “It’s so wonderful, you know?”
Egypt's Ministry of Antiquities announced on Tuesday that they had discovered the 3,800-year-old remains of Lady Sattjeni, whose family ruled Elephantine, the tactically-important Egyptian isle near Aswan, in the country's southern portion.
Archaeologists have been trying to piece together the genealogy of Elephantine rulers, and officials said that the discovery of Sattjeni's mummy would help. Sattjeni's family ruled Elephantine sometime around 1800 B.C., and ranked just below the family of the ruling pharaoh.
Her mummy was found in "extremely good condition," the antiquities ministry said, wrapped in linen and with parts of her cartonnage still visible on Sattjeni's face. Her coffin was made of wood, which ministry officials would probably allow them to date it with some specificity.
As the former southernmost point of Egypt, Elephantine was important in defending the country from attacks but also a key point of trade. It's also the site of an early Jewish settlement, and, to some, possibly a past home to the Ark of the Covenant.
What is the point of a beard, evolutionarily speaking? Children, women, and a whole bunch of men manage just fine without one. But take a walk down some streets these days and you’ll be confronted with all sizes and shapes of groomed (and less groomed) facial hair – from designer stubble to waxed moustaches and hipster beards.
When we see men paying attention to their appearance, it’s easy to assume that they’re just angling for partners. But our research on beards and voices shows that beards probably evolved at least partly to help men boost their standing among other men.
Compared to males and females of many other primates, men and women on average look very different from each other – partly thanks to men’s facial hair. And when we see differences between males and females, the explanation often boils down to evolution through sexual selection– the process that favors traits that boost mating opportunities.
But interestingly, women don’t seem that interested in beards. While some studies have found that women like a bit or even a lot of facial hair on men, other studies have reported that they prefer the clean-shaven look. The lack of consistent evidence means we can’t conclude that beards evolved because women were attracted to them.
Researchers have therefore suggested that a second type of sexual selection may hold the answer. To reproduce, it’s often not enough to simply be attractive. You also have to compete with the same sex for mating opportunities. The funny, shy guy at the back of the bar isn’t going to stand a chance when competing with his bolshier brothers otherwise. And there’s evidence that beards evolved to help men do just that.
A man’s ability to grow a fulsome beard isn’t actually neatly linked to his testosterone levels. Despite this, a number of studies have suggested that both men and women perceive men with beards as older, stronger and more aggressive than others. And dominant men can get more mating opportunities by intimidating rivals to stand aside.
This is something that holds true both in modern times and throughout human history. Dominance can provide a staggering short-cut to mating opportunities: genetic evidence indicates that about 8% of the male population of Asia today is a descendent of Genghis Khan and his family.
A study by the appropriately-named Nigel Barber linked British facial hair fashions between 1842 and 1971 to the ratio of men to women in the marriage market. It found that in times with a greater proportion of single men competing for fewer women, beards and moustaches became more fashionable.
The experiment
Beards aren’t the only feature that can convey dominance – voices do too. People tend to vote for leaders with lower-pitched voices, and during competitive tasks men lower the pitch of their voice if they think they are more dominant than their opponent. Like facial hair, voice pitch also easily distinguishes men and women.
To help trace the evolutionary origin of beards and voices, we tested whether they were seen as attractive, dominant or both. We asked 20 men and 20 women to rate the dominance and attractiveness of six men who were video-taped on four occasions as they let their facial hair grow. We then used computer software to create four versions of each video where the men’s voices had been changed to sound higher and lower-pitched.
We found that male voices that sounded deeper than average were rated as the most attractive. Really deep or high pitches weren’t as popular. In contrast, men’s voices were perceived as increasingly dominant the lower they were. Beards didn’t affect a man’s attractiveness rating consistently, but those who let their facial hair grow were perceived as more dominant than others – in line with previous research.
The tension between attracting a mate and competing with others doesn’t just apply to beards and voices. Men on average also think their body should be more muscular than women report that they want, while women on average believe they need to be thinner and wear more make-up than men report that they want. We’re not always that great at judging what the other sex finds appealing, but maybe that’s in part because our instincts are to out-compete our peers as well as attract a partner.
Of course, most of this research has been carried out within western populations. Make-up use, average body composition, and even the very ability to grow facial hair all differ enormously across the world – meaning we could get different results elsewhere.
But the point is that, whether it’s facial hair or something else, we often see this pattern of competing requirements leading to differences in appearances. Think you can please everyone all of the time? You can’t.
Prof. Marina Boyadjieva (first row, second right) with colleagues from the Multiprofile Hospital for Active Treatment in Neurology and Psychiatry St. Naum in Sofia, Bulgaria. (All Photos: Jordan Todorov)
LSD is usually associated with the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s. What has not been known until recently is that dozens of experiments involving the psychedelic drug were carried out in Communist Bulgaria, from 1962 to 1968, by the Bulgarian psychiatrist Marina Boyadjieva. Among the human guinea pigs were doctors, artists, miners, truck drivers, and even prisoners and mentally ill patients. These research subjects were involved in some 140 trials.
Years before Timothy Leary’s famous 1966 exhortation to “Turn on, tune in, drop out” and the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” LSD experiments were taking place in Bulgaria in the early years of the Cold War, where recreational drugs were completely unknown. Mind you, this was all happening legally and with the state’s blessing.
The experimental reproduction of psychosis in mentally healthy people was a hot topic in pharmacology and experimental psychiatry circles after World War II. Psychiatrists clamored to use so-called psychotomimetic drugs–chemical agents that reliably and dose dependently induce psychoses, like hallucinations and delusions–in their research. One of the most promising psychotomimetic drugs of the time was LSD.
A drawing from Prof. Boyadjieva’s doctoral thesis, Experimental psychological research on the psychotomimetic action of LSD-25.
Their aim for these experiments with LSD was to allow scientists to understand psychotic disorders like schizophrenia better by using the drug to mimic the effects of a naturally occurring psychosis. There were some similarities between drug-induced psychoses and natural ones, but it was easier to do a controlled study when causing psychosis through drugs.
LSD was first synthesized on November 16, 1938, by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland. Sandoz produced the drug under the generic name Delysid, and in the early 1960s spent about three million dollars to distribute samples of it to universities and mental hospitals worldwide. The company hoped that someone might find a practical application for the drug, in which case they would flood the market with it the way they had done with barbiturates and tranquilizers.
Professor Boyadjieva was lucky enough to get her hands on a small batch of LSD. At the time she was a research assistant at the Department of Psychiatry at the Medical University of Sofia, in Bulgaria. “In 1961, I met a Sandoz representative by the name of Mr. Burge. He told me they had LSD in doses of 0.025 mg. This was the so-called LSD-25,” recalls Boyadjieva. “In the beginning, I asked for a box of 50 ampoules, and later Mr. Burge brought me more.” She thought she could create an experimental model of psychosis with the help of LSD. And she did.
A young Boyadjieva in Paris, 1961.
“I administered refined LSD in small doses to the volunteers. It was a wholly organic substance. Clear as a teardrop!” says Boyadjieva. She did the experiments at the Multiprofile Hospital for Active Treatment in Neurology and Psychiatry–St. Naum, in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia. Most of the volunteers heard about the unusual experiments through the grapevine, with one person bringing another and then that person inviting others. The participants formed a tight circle around the professor.
Generally, the volunteers would ingest a sugar-coated tablet of Delysidcontaining 0.025 mg of LSD, or be injected with 100 micrograms of the drug. The substance was administered on an empty stomach or after a light breakfast. It kicked in 30 minutes to an hour later and its effects wore off with time. However, there was always a nurse on duty with a shot of 50 mg of the antipsychotic drug Chlorpromazine in case ill effects arose. Separate records were kept for each volunteer and they read like pulp fiction, says Boyadjieva.
Professor Venko Alexandrov, one of the original participants.
Professor Venko Alexandrov, now a respected university teacher and the director of an anesthesiology and resuscitation clinic, was one of the participants in the LSD experiments in the 1960s. Now 71, Alexandrov remembers his first LSD trip as if it were yesterday. The year was 1964 and he was a fourth-year medical student, aged 24.
“The nurse injected me with LSD and shut the door behind my back. I was in a room full of manic-depressive patients in depressive relapse. Twenty minutes later I felt a rush of warmth in my stomach,” says Alexandrov. “The waves began to bubble, rising higher and higher, and I felt great. In the end, I burst out in a mighty satanic cackle, infecting everyone else in the room. It was a great fun!”
Several painters also willingly participated in the LSD experiments. Some of them even brought easels and paints with them, believing they would be hit with bursts of inspiration. The drawings made during the LSD sessions were later included in Boyadjieva’s doctoral thesis. But according to her findings, LSD cannot actually make one more creative. However, it can make a person “see” letters and words in different colors and experience synesthesia.
A drawing made by one of the participant in the Bulgarian LSD tests.
In addition to experimenting on consenting healthy volunteers, Boyadjieva did so on mentally ill patients as well, who could not consent. In 1966, she conducted a series of tests on patients with schizophrenia and manic depression. Most of their reactions were unpredictable. A 22-year old man downed Boyadjieva’s ink bottle. A 35-year old woman started to feel quite sensual and became vulgar. A Norwegian research subject wanted to fry the goldfish in the professor’s aquarium.
Boyadjieva’s activities soon came to the attention of the army. “The Cold War was at its peak. Apparently our military had heard some disconcerting things about the LSD experiments conducted in the West at that time,” recalls Boyadjieva. “They were interested if the drug could be used as a weapon of mass destruction or a truth serum. They literally asked me: “Can they [the West] make us go crazy with it?”
Prof. Boyadjieva in Algeria in 1966.
As per the army’s request, she conducted experiments on two young soldiers in the premises of the Military Medical Academy, next door to the Alexandrovska University Hospital in Sofia, where she was then working. She signed a confidentiality agreement and injected the soldiers with 25 micrograms of LSD in the presence of a colonel and a military psychiatrist. The experiment was filmed by the military, which confiscated all reports on it. Boyadjieva never heard from the army officials again.
Bulgaria wasn’t the only country behind the Iron Curtain that was interested in LSD experiments back then. One of the early pioneers in the study of LSD and its possible medical benefits was a young Czech doctor by the name of Stanislav Grof. Starting in 1958, he began conducting his clinical experiments with LSD in the most unlikely of places–the Prague Psychiatric Research Institute. "If I am the father of LSD," Hofman, the drug’s inventor, famously said, "Stan Grof is the godfather."
Another Czech physician, Dr. Milan Hausner, directed a team of thirty psychiatrists at a clinic near Prague and treated over 700 patients in 6,000 sessions between 1956 and 1974. The Czech army also began looking into whether LSD could be used as a weapon in the Cold War. These tests lasted until the 1970s, even as LSD became more notorious around the world.
Changes during graphology test with volunteers under the influence of LSD. 1-Before administration of LSD. 2- 1½ hour after administration of LSD. 3 - 2½ hour after administration of LSD. 4 - 3½ hour after administration of LSD.
By the mid-1960s, the drug had become subject to increased scrutiny in the West, due to its popularity as a recreational drug. After protests from the American government, Sandoz stopped its legal shipments of Delysid to the U.S., Theodore X. Barber writes in LSD, Marihuana, Yoga, and Hypnosis, and placed their entire supply in a laboratory in New Jersey, in the hands of the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).
By August 1965, the Swiss company had ceased manufacturing the chemical entirely. That same year the U.S. Food and Drug Administration began to withdraw the licenses for experimenting with the drug on humans. On October 6, 1966, California outlawed the hallucinogen; other states were quick to follow.
During this time, NIMH reduced its LSD research programs from over a hundred to only a few. In 1969, only six experiments were carried out in the U.S. That year Boyadjieva successfully presented her thesis, “Experimental Psychological Research on the Psychotomimetic Action of LSD-25,” and received a Doctor of Medical Science degree from the Medical University of Sofia.
Another drawing by one of the participants.
“After my thesis defense I met with the Sandoz representative Mr. Burge one more time, and I told him that I need more LSD. I told him that the military wanted me to experiment further. He said “I’m sorry, Madam, but we destroyed all the reserves,” says Boyadjieva.
In 1974, the National Institute of Mental Health released findings thatconcluded that LSD had no therapeutic use, and the few remaining research projects were abandoned. This was the end of an age of optimism and belief in the healing powers of LSD.
The bizarre story of the LSD-induced psychoses in Communist Bulgaria remained virtually unknown until recently. Most people were unaware that drugs were even present there at all. "In the end of the 1960s Bulgaria was a virgin country when it came to recreational drugs,” says Boyadjieva.
Boyadjieva in her home.
After her time researching therapeutic applications of LSD in the 1960s, Boyadjieva went on to work as an addiction consultant for the World Health Organization, later chairing the State Psychiatric Hospital for the Treatment of Drug Addictions and Alcoholism, outside Sofia. “The first wave of drug addiction hit Sofia in the early 1970s. The drug of choice was morphine,” she says. “Then came the amphetamines and then heroin in the 1990s, and all hell broke loose.“
Boyadjieva was able to understand the strong pull that drugs had on her patients. During her early experiments, she tried LSD a few times herself, “out of scientific interest” as she puts it. It was helpful, she says: the drug enabled her to gain an insight into the world of the mentally ill by experiencing schizophrenia-like symptoms herself.
“One time I took LSD with the medical students. When I got home, my husband and children, who knew of the experiments, played “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” Boyadjieva recalls. “I went to the window and saw a moving shadow. I got tense but I was aware it was all an illusion.”
Geisel Library, University of California, San Diego, California, USA, 1970 by William Pereira & Associates. (Photo: Courtesy University of California, San Diego)
The building above might not be the place you’d expect to house the Dr. Seuss archives, or indeed be named after him. The thick concrete and geometric lines are the opposite of whimsical. But the Geisel Library at UC San Diego is in fact named after Audrey and Theodor Seuss Geisel. Designed by William Pereira, it is also a prominent example of brutalist architecture, and so iconic for the university that it was incorporated into its logo.
The Geisel Library opened in 1970. Later that decade, as art director and graphic designer Peter Chadwick was growing up in north-east England, he found himself inspired by the concrete industrial buildings and new towns. As an adult, he began to photograph examples of brutalist architecture wherever he could find them. In 2014, Chadwick created the twitter account BrutalHouse, as a place to share his photos.
As a long-time champion of brutalism, Chadwick has now curated a new book from Phaidon, This Brutal World. With over 300 examples from around the world, it's an engaging and global look at this divisive form of architecture. With all of the photographs in stark black and white, the book celebrates brutalism in all its monolithic, unapologetic glory. Here are some highlights.
The Golden Record is affixed to the Voyager 1 spacecraft, 29 July 1979. (Photo: NASA/Public Domain)
The year is… let's say it's 42026. You're cruising along your regular orbit, minding your own business, when suddenly, your craft's detection system registers a mysterious interloper. An image of it blinks onscreen: It's unshielded, it's oddly shaped, and it's not showing up in any of the databases.
From a distance, it looks like one for the junk heap—cheap metal, outdated design, and judging from its 17,000 meter-per-second approach, slower than anything else in the galaxy. But as it comes closer, something catches your attention. Attached to the underside of the craft, standing out against its black exterior, is a shiny disc.
Minutes later, you've towed the thing to the nearest port, and are watching as mechanics wrench the disc off, read the instructions, and begin to decode what's inside. Someone in the know clues you in: you've found one of the famed Voyager Golden Records, the last known vestiges of the legendary Humans of the late Planet Earth.
Launched in 1977 aboard Voyager Probes 1 and 2, the two identical Golden Records are essentially "Now! That's What I Call Earth," meant to sum up the whole warp and weft of humankind in 118 images, fifteen minutes of recorded sound, and a few dozen songs. The probes' scientific instruments are slowly grinding down—by 2035, they will have all winked out—but the crafts themselves will keep going indefinitely, their shining cultural payloads in tow, prepared to show humanity's good side to any aliens who might come across them. Jimmy Carter, the sitting U.S. president when they were sent off, described the records as "a present from a small distant world."
The cover of the Golden Record. The etchings are on both the inside and the outside, to account for erosion, and they have a specific meaning. (Photo: NASA/Public Domain)
Excited, you settle in to see what they've sent. Sound fills the room: moaning whales; stones slamming into one another; about a minute of strange crackling; an excellent trumpet solo. Pictures flicker across the walls: two human figures with all their anatomical details alarmingly censored by silhouette; a long list of names of 1977 US Senators; a balding man taking a bite out of a sandwich that already has a bite taken out of it on the other side.
"Zoinks," you think to yourself, shaking your heads. "It's no wonder these guys died out."
Brag to the Future
Throughout human history, people have struggled with two competing impulses: the desire to make a mark for future generations, and a deep confusion about what, exactly, that mark should be.
The Golden Records, though probably the most extreme manifestation of this impulse, are far from the first. "There have been time-capsule type experiences ever since humans have measured time," writes librarian William Jarvis in Time Capsules: A Cultural History.
It’s easy to make fun of time capsules, but, as Jarvis details, it’s much harder to fill them with the kind of material that will actually stand the test of time. Often, the things we tuck away for posterity are embarrassing or boring. Sometimes, they're much worse—racist, bigoted, wrongheaded. Most take that old adage about the winners writing history to its logical conclusion. And they are always, by their very nature, exceedingly presumptuous.
The Voyager 2 launch on August 20, 1977, from Cape Canaveral, Florida. (Photo: NASA)
In the seventh century B.C.E., Esarhaddon, leader of what was then Assyria, took a deep breath and ordered his mind. As king, he had defeated enemy uprisings and extended his empire’s territory. He had built monuments and statues, and restored old, crumbling temples to their former glory. Now, it was time to complete another kind of royal task.
As his scribe stood nearby, stylus poised above a clay cylinder, Esarhaddon spoke proudly of his wide-ranging accomplishments. Dutifully, the scribe wrote them down. The cylinder, once dried, would be hidden in the walls of the city’s next building, to be found and studied by future kings—just as Esarhaddon, while remaking Babylon, had found and learned from his predecessors’ inscriptions. These carved monoliths—half historical artifact, half intergenerational chest-puff—are among the first time capsules.
When faced with incomprehensible vastness, humans generally respond by asserting ourselves. Religion inspires buildings and empires. Love leads to paintings, poems and songs. Even Mount Everest gets graffitied. Time capsules allow for a special kind of expression—they let us brag to the future.
“One of the functions of time capsules is glorified advertisement or boasting,” says Jarvis. To ensure their brag sheets’ longevity, the Assyrian kings ended messages by asking future finders to hype up their accomplishments, like an old-school reblog request. Many courted populist cred: In what Jarvis describes as an early PR move, Mesopotamian time capsules found hidden in walls specifically mention the high wages of the wall-builders. Esharhaddon’s successor, Ashurbanipal, wrote in one of his missives that his subjects were so excited about the whole thing, they threw their amulets en masse into the capsule's burial site. (How he managed to include this information without time-traveling himself remains a mystery.)
The Golden Records (and their 1972 predecessors, the Pioneer plaques) were the first to explicitly market themselves toward aliens—although their creators were well aware that, with the low odds of the Voyager probes ever getting intercepted, Earthlings were their primary audience. But even as the intended audiences shift, the capsules' psychological underpinnings stay pretty much the same. In 1879, an Illinois veteran named Lieutenant Colonel John McNulta put together a bottle of important items and bid that it remain sealed for a full century. McNulta had served in the Civil War, and experienced 14 years of its aftermath—Reconstruction, the Great Chicago Fire, the invention of the telegraph. When the McLean County Museum uncorked the bottle in 1979, as instructed, they were treated to the items McNulta had considered worth saving: a picture of himself, the menu for a fancy banquet he’d been to, and an unsmoked cigar, which McNulta ordered be enjoyed by either one of his descendants or a particularly good soldier.
The term “time capsule” was coined in 1938, as a marketing trick. That year, the Westinghouse Electronics and Manufacturing Company, then the country’s second-biggest appliance retailer, hired a publicist named G. Edward Pendray to jumpstart their sales. Pendray was a big fan of rocketry, and he designed what was essentially an eight-foot thermos, shaped like a torpedo. Westinghouse invented a new super-durable alloy, called Cupaloy, for the capsule.
A postcard for the Westinghouse building at the 1939 World's Fair. (Photo: Joe Haupt/CC BY-SA 2.0)
They filled the capsule with a Kewpie doll, a copy of LIFE, a bunch of seeds, and many samples of plastic. It would stay sealed, they said, for 5,000 years—enough time to put 1938 at “the halfway point of civilization.” They sold a commemorative book, explaining how “the learned among [future civilizations] may study with pleasure and profit things now in existence which are unique to our time.” (Reading the book gives you a sense of exactly what, according to Westinghouse, made the time unique: “We have… created dyes, materials, stuffs that Nature herself forgot to make,” it reads. “We have made metals our slaves.”)
“When they lowered the Time Capsule of Cupaloy into the ground, all the men instinctively whipped their hats off, because it was a solemn occasion,” says Jarvis. “The had a Chinese restaurant gong that they borrowed, and as they put the capsule down into the Immortal Well—which itself was some sort of plastic—they sounded it.” It was, perhaps, the first time mankind removed their hats for a piece of branded content.
Not everyone included in the capsule felt like bragging. Tucked into the cylinder among the material artifacts were missives from “Noted Men Of Our Time”: Robert Millikan, Thomas Mann, and Albert Einstein. Millikan describes the struggles of democracy against despotism, and Mann predicts that future readers of his message will be as dispirited as the people of his time. Due to war and uncertainty, adds Einstein, “any one who thinks about the future must live in fear and terror.” He ends on a wryly prescient note: “I trust that posterity will read these statements with a feeling of proud and justified superiority.”
Bureaucracy Goes to Space
When Carl Sagan was four years old, his parents took him to see the Time Capsule of Cupaloy. Thirty-eight years later, in the introduction to the Golden Records’ own commemorative book, Murmurs of Earth, he recalled the experience. “There was something very graceful and human in the gesture, hands across the centuries, an embrace of our descendants and our posterity,” he wrote. “For those who have done something they consider worthwhile, communication to the future is an almost irresistible temptation.”
Sagan bit this particular apple a few different times. In 1972, the famed astrophysicist and science communicator helped design the Pioneer plaques, which, like the Golden Records, were blasted into space on probes set to traverse the universe indefinitely. The diagrams depict a hydrogen atom, a pulsar map of the galaxy, and two nude human figures—a man with his hand up, and a slightly shorter woman in the background. Four years later, he took charge of a similar explanatory plate for the satellite LAGEOS-1, which will orbit Earth for 8.4 million years, tracking tectonic drift.
Dr Carl Sagan in Death Valley, California, with a model of the Viking lander, c. 1975. (Photo: NASA/Public Domain)
By the time astronomer F.D. Drake asked Sagan to help design a cultural hitchhiker for the Voyager probes, he was ready to go big. He wanted international music. He wanted multilingual greetings. He wanted a representative slice of the human race's collective experience—images, songs and sounds that would explain not only what we were, but who we were, too.
This would have been a tall order regardless of time and funding, but the Golden Record team's resources were nearly as limited as their goals were vast. Less than half a dozen people worked on it, and, after deciding on the project’s form and scope, they only had about six weeks to actually put the thing together. By their own account, the curation process was less like building a timeless cabinet of wonders and more like undertaking a kind of bureaucracy-boxed scavenger hunt.
In the best cases, these limitations lent a kind of rambunctious, Scooby-Doo feel to the proceedings. Sagan wandered the streets of New York in search of two rocks to clang together, hoping to sonically approximate the creation of the first stone tools. To get a special recorder delivered from Colorado as quickly as possible, the team booked it a plane ticket under the name "Mr. Equipment."
An explanation of the Golden Record's cover diagrams. (Photo: NASA/Public Domain)
In Murmurs of Earth, Anne Druyan, the record's creative director, describes a breathless search for "Jaat Kahan Ho," a raga performed by the Indian classical vocalist Kesarbai Kerkar and, at the time, long out of print. After ethnomusicologist Robert Brown insisted this was the only acceptable choice for First Raga In Space, Druyan called up every Indian restaurant in Manhattan for leads, and finally found three copies at an appliance store on Lexington Avenue. “Why I want to buy all three occasions a great deal of animated speculation on the part of the owners,” writes Druyan. “I fly out of the shop and race uptown to listen to it.”
At other times, though, the dream of representing the entirety of the planet ran hard into the particular strictures of the late-1970s United States. Take the otherwise inexplicable Senator list. Seeking recordings of greetings in various languages, Sagan approached the United Nations—but the UN couldn't act without a motion from a national delegation, and the US Delegation wouldn't move without the State Department, and the State Department wouldn't budge without an okay from NASA. By involving this telephone-chain of organizations, Sagan accidentally solicited spacebound messages from the UN Secretary General and President Jimmy Carter, and a large list of the names of senators and representatives who didn't want to be left out. NASA insisted he include either none of these gifts, or all of them. "So in case the reader wonders how it is, say, that Senator John Stennis of Mississippi has his name aboard the Voyager record," Sagan writes, "I suppose it goes back to the nature of bureaucracies."
Examining theWestinghouse's Time Capsule II, at the 1964 New York World's Fair. Both are buried in Flushing Meadows Park. (Photo: Austin Hall/CC BY-SA 2.0)
Murmurs of Earth is chock full of these stories—mandated additions, accidental exclusions, and strange in-between compromises. The records contain whale sounds, crickets, and Carl Sagan’s son, but no Swahili, because that particular volunteer missed his recording appointment. One of the earlier pictures on the record, of a child being born, includes the upside-down baby and a masked doctor, but no mother. (“In all photographs we looked at, the mother was so hidden by sheets that it wasn’t clear that it was a woman, or even a person, that was giving birth,” explains Jon Lomberg, who headed up the photo division.)
Other omissions were more purposeful. Early on, Lomberg writes, "we reached a consensus that we shouldn’t present war, disease, crime, and poverty"—for fear of riling up the aliens, or tainting what could, eventually, be the universe's last remnant of humanity. NASA, gunshy after the Pioneer plaques led the public to accuse them of intergalactic smut proliferation, refused to let any more naked people into space, so the team sent two silhouettes instead, one with a line-drawn fetus inside. They imposed more rules, too—here is Anne Druyan on the recording of "Kiss:"
"This wonderful sound proved to be the most difficult to record. We were under strict orders from NASA to keep it heterosexual, and within such a constraint we tried every permutation we could think of without success. [Interscope Records head] Jimmy Iovine happened to show up that day, and he was most anxious to produce a believable kiss by sucking his arm. But this was to be that impossible thing, a kiss that would last forever, and we wanted it to be real. After many unusuable kisses that were too faint or too smacky, Tim [Ferris] kissed me softly on the cheek; it felt and sounded fine."
One of the last photographs on the record is of an Antarctic Sno-Cat dangling helplessly over a yawning ice chasm, its attendant humans flummoxed by the situation. Lomberg describes this as a relatable joke—“freeing stuck vehicles may be an experience we share with alien explorers,” he writes—but in some ways, it’s a good metaphor for the whole project. After all, the Golden Records’ creators had their own particular regrets. Sagan famously wanted to include “Here Comes the Sun,” but although all four Beatles agreed, their publisher didn’t, and he couldn’t get the copyright clearance. Lomberg was a little skeeved out by the insect representative, a yellow wasp whose parasitic larvae eat their host alive. F.D. Drake, bemoaning the fact that the record’s sounds and images weren’t at all coordinated, imagines a future alien audience that is equally pressed for time, and thus empathetic. “Perhaps this will be nothing new to Them,” he writes. “Perhaps there will be a motion we wouldn’t recognize, to Them a nod, as They realize that a billion years before there had been a civilization little different from Theirs.”
Trash Capsules
An updated capsule for 2389, and which included special Kindles. (Photo: Courtesy Knute Berger/ Washington State Archives)
Knute Berger—professional time capsuler, World’s Fair historian, and founding member of the International Time Capsule Society—has spent a lot of time thinking about how best to bottle history. He can tell you the pros and cons of most archival materials (terra cotta is your best bet). He’s searched the Capitol, unsuccessfully, for George Washington’s lost cornerstone capsule—which, he says, “could be in a rock pile somewhere.” Bit by bit, he has amassed his own internal time capsule collection, stacked to the roof with stories, examples, and best practices.
Over years of research, one theme really stands out: “I’ve learned a lot about how many of them get lost,” says Berger. The vast majority of time capsules, he explains, are made by amateurs, many of whom are less concerned with the actual future than with commemorating the present, or giving themselves a long-term gift. “They’ll never do another time capsule,” he says. “It’s a one-time thing.”
Time capsule mistakes are manifold. Rookies choose the wrong packaging, and leave their descendants to dig up boxes of green slime, or bags of soggy garbage. They neglect to airlock their concrete bunker, and end up, like this Tulsa town, with a completely rusted-out Plymouth Belvedere. Mostly, like nut-crazed squirrels in the fall, they fail to mark, write down, or otherwise remember their burial sites. “People think memory is stronger than it is,” says Berger. “I spend a lot of time looking for my glasses and my car keys—but somehow we think if we have a ceremony and we put something in the ground, then everybody's going to remember.”
The frontispiece to the booklet The Story of the Westinghouse Time Capsule, praising "what hitherto had seemed impossible could now be done". (Photo: Internet Archive/Public Domain)
Even large organizations, with their collective brainpower, can't seem to get it right. In 1953, Washington State buried a sofa-sized metal tube full of midcentury goods—“but the legislature wouldn’t float the money for a marker, and so they forgot where it was,” Berger says. The U.S. Bicentennial capsule, made up of 22 million American signatures, was stolen by outlaws during its 1976 cross-country wagon train tour, and has never been found. MIT buried a time capsule under the lid of a cyclotron in 1939; fifty years later, they realized they couldn’t move the machine’s 18-ton lid, so they left it there. (Meanwhile, last year, Cambridge construction workers accidentally unearthed another MIT capsule that was meant to lay dormant until 2957.) Listening to Berger rattle off lost capsules, you get the feeling that the ground you’re standing on is filled with layer upon layer of hopeful artifacts, accidentally left to rot.
The Golden Records, Berger says, were anything but an amateur attempt. As someone who is always trying to avoid relying on outdated tech, he admires their analog nature, which ensures that—materially, at least—they won’t fade into obsolescence. The strategies they use for dealing with potential communication issues—the diagrammatic record-playing instructions, and what he calls the “Rosetta Stone quality” of the 50 recorded greetings—remind him of other grand, sweeping capsules, like the Crypt of Civilization, which contains a hand-cranked machine meant to provide future discoverers with rudimentary English lessons.
Indeed, the Crypt of Civilization may be the Golden Records' closet terrestrial equivalent. Housed in an old swimming pool at Atlanta's Oglethorpe University, it has a similarly broad scope. It was first proposed by professor and clergyman Thornwell Jacobs in 1936 to preserve the “life, manners and customs of the present civilization” for posterity, and is set to be opened in 8113 A.D. In the meantime, you can browse its inventory—which, if you’re looking for them, boasts its own set of weird contents: six Artie Shaw recordings; an electric Toastolator; a “sample of gold mesh;” two white dolls and one Black one; a proportionally strange amount of women’s underthings. Civilization, indeed.
To Berger, true time capsule judgment should be reserved for the intended audience—“I mean, how do you put together a record that doesn’t seem like something you’d find at a garage sale?” he asks. But he still thinks we can do better. In 1989, his home state's Centennial Commission tapped Berger to organize a large project, the Washington State Time Capsule, which he hopes will overcome some of these failings.
The sealing ceremony of Centennial time Capsule Project in 1990. Knute Berger is on the right, and the girl is one of the 'Keepers of the Capsule' who updated the capsule in 2014. (Photo: Courtesy Knute Berger/ Washington State Archives)
Because individual time capsules so quickly outdate, he’s set up a warren of 16 of them, set to be filled one at a time every 25 years. Because they tend to be so strange when stripped of their context, he’s focusing more on individual experiences than any attempts at sweeping best-ofs. And, thanks to all the loss problems he’s seen, he’s training the next generation as “capsule-keepers,” sworn to responsibility by the state in adolescence, when memories really stick. He and his team filled the second capsule in 2014. It covers the years since 1989—“essentially a lot of Amazon and grunge,” he says.
“My argument was, we’re creating the layers of an archaeological site,” he says. “What you’ll see over time is how our thinking evolved, and how the concept of the time capsule evolved.” Layer upon layer of weirdness—what else is history, after all? “Some of it's intentional, some of it's random, and some of it's completely unpredictable,” he says. “But you hope something in there sticks.”
Artifacts and Artefictions
Alien scholars may not get their tendrils on Voyager for another 10,000 years or so, but thanks to the intense documentation of its creation, human ones are already all over it. Dr. Alice Gorman, a space archaeologist at Australia’s Adelaide University, studies the Golden Records as artifacts, subject to anthropological scrutiny. “There’s a long tradition of putting things on spacecraft that have some kind of personal or cultural meaning,” she says. “I’m interested in the choices people make about what to send along.”
Gorman began by looking deeper into the two Aboriginal songs on the records. In Murmurs of Earth, they are listed as “Morning Star” and “Devil Bird”—but as Gorman eventually found out, the songs are mislabeled. “Devil Bird” is actually “Moikoi”—a song, Gorman writes, about “malicious spirits who try to entice newly deceased souls away from their clan country.” Though this won’t matter to the aliens, who aren’t privy to the liner notes, it does confuse human scholars trying to better understand the record's contents.
Murmurs of Earth also lists the people who recorded the songs rather than those who performed them—“so next up was saying, who are the musicians, who are the people?” Gorman says. She traced the songs’ provenance back to three men: Djawa, a community leader and artist; Mudpo, a didjeridu player, and Waliparu, an older man. “There’s a whole other layer of identifying and situating them in the story,” she says. This applies to most of the non-Western music—who is playing that melancholy Japanese shakuhachi? Which young Peruvian girl is hurtling through space singing an Incan “Wedding Song”?
The same goes for nearly all of the photographs, which identify Jane Goodall, French climber Gaston Rebuffat, and American gymnast Cathy Rigby, but none of the Filipino parents, Balian dancers, or laughing Chinese family members. A picture from the Olympics comes with a caption naming Russian champion Valery Borzov, and calling the second, third and fourth place finishers “two black men and an Oriental.” Another shows an anonymous black woman peering into a microscope. Gorman has been trying to track her down. “We’ve had all these debates in recent times about the role of women in science and how women of color are marginalized,” she says. “And here in 1977 there’s a black female scientist, and we don’t even know who she is!”
John Casani, Voyager project manager, with the golden record (left) and its cover (right), August 4, 1977. The Voyager 2 is behind him; the American flag was sewn into the thermal blankets of the spacecraft. (Photo: NASA/Public Domain)
The Golden Record's curators got many of their images and songs from other sources—photo archives, music libraries, and sound collections, many of which failed to provide exhaustive information. But this persistent lack of certain details is telling, regardless of exactly where it comes from. “[Sagan was] so thoughtful, and they were making efforts to be inclusive across the board,” Gorman says, “but they were people of their time as well. The meanings of these pictures, and the relationships between the different themes, are telling stories they never could have imagined.”
These days, Gorman points out, you’d never make the Golden Record the way Sagan and his compatriots did. Most more recent attempts at interstellar communication are unabashedly crowdsourced. The New Horizons Message Initiative, also helmed by Golden Record team member Jon Lomberg, recently announced a plan to send a “global self-portrait” to New Horizons, made up of submissions from people across the world. “It was very presumptuous of Carl Sagan and the rest of us to speak for Earth [in 1977],” Lomberg told National Geographic in 2014, "but at the time it was either do it that way or don't do it at all."
Of course, it’s presumptuous to add to a crowdsourced self-portrait, too. It’s presumptuous to assume aliens or future kings are listening, or to bury something and expect you, or anyone else, will remember to dig it up. When you’re dealing with the future, presumption is the whole point. And the things we presume may tell our future selves more about us than the baubles, snippets, and images we carefully choose to present.
Better just stick to the path around the Grand Prismatic Spring. (Photo: James St. John/CC BY 2.0)
Just because you’ve got an upbeat social media presence and enough money to travel around making Youtube videos of your sweet vacation doesn’t mean you get to go wherever you please, as the High On Life SundayFundayz crew recently found out after traipsing over Yellowstone Park’s Grand Prismatic Spring. An offense for which they are now facing criminal charges.
The SundayFundayz gang is made up of a trio of Youtubers, whose self-stated mission is to “ travel around the world for a living and make fun and adventurous videos! We also have a clothing company.” After meeting in high school, and reconnecting after college, the three have traveled the world, documenting their epic bro-downs in a series of videos. It was during their current “Great American Road Trip,” that they found themselves in Yellowstone National Park, and took upon themselves to stroll over the Grand Prismatic Spring, the largest hot spring in America, and a delicate geological marvel.
Yellowstone’s Grand Prismatic Spring is a massive boiling lake that is known for its vivid rainbow coloring, caused by the unique mix of geologic reactions at the site. But for all its beauty, it also spews hundreds of gallons of scaling liquid every minute. Visitors to the spring are kept to a designated boardwalk that keeps them safe from the boiling water, and keeps the natural environment safe from human damage. The High On Life boyz disregarded both concerns when they walked off the boardwalk towards the spring to get an up-close shot for their latest video.
However, when news of their trespassing reached authorities, they didn’t find the stunt quite so awesome. Three of the High On Life guys, Charles Ryker Gamble, Alexey Andriyovych Lyakh, and Justis Cooper Price-Brown have now been issued federal arrest warrants for, as the Bozeman Daily Chronicle put it, “creating a hazardous or physically offensive condition.” A fourth member of the group, Hamish McNab Campbell Cross, was not initially issued a warrant, but has since been equally charged for the offense.
While they have not been arrested, their social media has been buried in an avalanche of negative responses to their stunt, with a Change.org petition even popping up asking that their sponsorship be pulled. For their part, the boyz released a lengthy apology on Facebook, pledging to donate $5,000 to Yellowstone Park, saying, “We hope that our community will forgive us for our misstep and continue to see us as a source of positivity and inspiration as we continue to capture this life worth living.”
The SundayFundayz crew is assumed to have returned to Canada, where they are from, and U.S. authorities have stated that they would not be pursuing them, but it is hoped that they will return to the States to settle the matter. Maybe they could make a video about it.
Correction: This article previously stated that Parker Heuser was Hamish McNab Campbell Cross, which was incorrect. His name has been removed from the piece.
In a cave in northern Spain’s Basque country, at least 70 cave paintings have been hiding for thousands of years. Axturra cave was first discovered in 1929, but a recent survey, in the fall of 2015, uncovered a series of drawings dating back approximately 14,500 years, to the later part of the Upper Paleolithic period.
The drawings show horses, goats, deer and bison, including one that looks to be impaled by spears. They were found almost 1,000 feet into the cave, along ledges about 13 feet above the cave floor. Once, they might have been blackened with coal.
Paintings of bison, as they appear now (above) and as they might have appeared (below). (Photo: Provincial County of Bizkaia)
The pictures were found by an archaeologist, Diego Garate, and a caver, Iñaki Intxaurbe. The cave’s since been closed off to the public so that the art can be studied and preserved. Garate believes these 70 drawings, found across 14 panels, will be recognized as one of the most important archaeological finds in this region. There may be more to discover in this cave, too–there’s a third section that’s yet to be explored.
Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com
The Taj Mahal, one of the world's most-visited monuments, draws 20,000 people every day.
Over the past few weeks, though, Agra's iconic building has hosted some less welcome visitors: swarms of Chironomus calligraphus insects, Times of India reports. The winged vandals fly up to the Taj from the nearby Yamuna river, crawl all over the walls, and leave behind green smears of bug poop.
Environmentalists say the problem lies with the Yamuna, which has borne the brunt of Agra's growing industrialization. "Fifty-two drains are pouring waste directly into the river," activist DK Joshi told the BBC. The pollution kills the river's insect-eating fish, which precipitates a bug population explosion.
The green smears are easily hosed off, but that just hides the larger issues, say Joshi and other concerned citizens. On Monday, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav ordered officials to take action to fix the problem. Sometimes, bugging the government works.
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.
On June 20th, 1938, pedestrians near bustling Herald Square in Midtown Manhattan were treated to a scene right out of a dime store novel. A well-dressed middle-aged woman was fighting with a man, attempting to subdue him. He pushed her in the face, and she retaliated, knocking him into submission with a swing of her long strapped pocket book. The man was lucky she did not use the gun tucked carefully into the folds of her dress.
The man was a suspected jewel thief, and his captor was an undercover policewoman with the press sobriquet of “Deadshot” Mary. “Well, I got him,” she told two patrolmen who had rushed to the scene to help, “and I can take him in myself.”
“Deadshot” Mary Shanley was born in Ireland in 1896. Her family immigrated to America, and in 1931, the boisterous and brave Mary joined the NYPD. This was an unusual step for a woman of her time, though not unheard of.
During the first half of the 20th century, policewomen in America often worked undercover, on so-called “women's beats.” “They are called upon regularly to trail or trap mashers, shoplifters, pickpockets and fortune-tellers; to impersonate drug addicts and hardened convicts, to expose criminal medical practice, find lost persons, guide girls in trouble, break up fake matrimonial bureaus and perform special detective duty,” wrote the New York Times.
For most of her career, Mary would be assigned to the NYPD pickpocket squad. By the time of her retirement in 1957, she would be a first grade detective, with over 1,000 arrests under her belt.
Mary cut her teeth on the force working undercover to catch fortune-tellers who set up storefronts in buildings all across Manhattan. Fortune-telling was illegal at the time, partially because of prejudice against the immigrant communities where it was popular, and partly because it was seen as a swindle most likely to ensnare lonely, vulnerable, white women.
Undercover policewomen would visit the fortune-tellers, and after paying for their readings, arrest them. In 1931, the New York Times reported on Shanley’s arrest of a certain ingenious soothsayer named Princess Juniata Flynn:
Policewoman Shanley…unwrapped a striped bandanna handkerchief from the head of the “Princess,” revealing a telephone head set resting snugly against her ears. The basket into which written questions were put revealed a false bottom which led to an assistant who telephoned the inquiries to the seer, who would repeat the questions, amazing her clients.
In December 1934, a change came to the NYPD. The 140 or so female police officers on the force were now required to carry guns (the practice had been voluntary before) when they prowled department stores, shopping centers, and crowded entertainment areas. They were issued 16-ounce revolvers, which were half the weight of the guns policemen carried, and were required to take target practice.
“On the practice range in headquarters’ basement some of the women have proved more gun shy than others,” a reporter patronizingly wrote. “But none has figured in an ‘I didn’t know it was loaded’ mishap. Neither has any hit the bullseye ten times in a row for a perfect 100, though several have broken 80.”
A few years later, Mary became the first policewoman in the history of the NYPD to use a gun during a capture and arrest, when she fired into the air while pursuing a racketeer on 53rd Street. Around this time, local papers began to report on her exploits, amazed that a five-foot-eight, 160-pound woman had the strength to subdue grown men, sometimes two at a time!
“Mary Shanley ordered two suspicious characters, neither of them weaklings, into the lobby of the Longacre Building in Times Square shortly after 10 o’clock last night,” the New York Times reported breathlessly. “They complied, for everything in the policewoman’s mien indicated determination–even the firm grasp of her right hand on her service pistol. Searching them in the lobby and finding on them…imitation pistols, she arrested them on charges of carrying concealed weapons.”
These cameos in the crime blotters earned her the enduring nickname “Deadshot Mary,” as well as comparisons to the legendary sharpshooter Annie Oakley. She became a media darling, sometimes posing for pictures where she looked like a respectable middle-class matron, except for the gun she was pointing directly at the camera. In the Sunday series “Heroines of Today,” illustrator Nell Brinkley depicted an idealized Shanley shooting her gun, capturing criminals, and tucked into a stylish bed reading a mystery novel and eating crackers.
Mary also gave many interviews. She told the New York World Telegram that she respected stick-up men, because “at least they pick out places that can afford to get robbed.” Overall, she “never felt sorry” for any of the people she arrested. Speaking with the Panama City Herald, Mary described her typical day searching for crooks:
“Detectives assigned to the pickpocket squad aren’t given leads,” says Detective Shanley, who has red hair and hazel eyes and looks as though she might be a college physical education instructor, “so I start my day by dressing to suit the neighborhood I have decided to work in.”
All day long, she wanders through department stores, stands in theater lines, and pushes her way into crowds. Five times a day she reports to the department by telephone. When anyone looks suspicious, she follows him or her, as the case may be. Usually it’s a her, for Detective Shanley does her work where there are crowds of women.
“I can usually tell in 20 minutes whether a suspect is legitimate or not. Often when I have a hunch there is something phony about a woman, I trail her a whole day without seeing her try anything funny. If that happens, I trail her home, and then look for her picture in the police files. If I find it, I keep after the woman until I catch her at work.”
“She could smell them I tell you,” niece Mary Shanley Mullins remembered in the 2006 documentary Sleuthing Mary Shanley. “Macy’s loved her. That was a great spot for pickpockets.” Sometimes, the policewoman would take her niece to work with her: “I would be a decoy for her. She didn’t look like a detective looking for a pickpocket, she was a mother out with her daughter.”
In August 1939, Shanley was promoted to the rank of first-grade detective, only the fourth woman in the history of the NYPD to receive this honor. The year before, the NYPD had offered the first civil service exam for aspiring policewomen. Some 3,700 women took the exam, and 20 were accepted into the Police Academy the next year. There can be little doubt that Mary’s recorded feats encouraged some women to pursue law enforcement careers.
According to Mullins, Mary “was not interested in a husband. She enjoyed her life. She had her freedom and her good salary. She was just different. She was very outspoken, very opinionated. She didn’t fit in then as well as she probably would now. She was born too soon.”
Mary’s status as a role model was briefly tested in 1941, when she was suspended for firing her NYPD-issued gun while drinking off-duty in a bar in Jackson Heights, Queens. Mary claimed she had been under a doctor’s care after surgery for a job-related injury. She had felt dizzy, ordered a whisky to steady herself and blacked out. Whatever the truth of the story, she was quickly reinstated to her beat.
As Mary got older, she didn’t lose her tough edge. In 1950, she was working at a Macy’s store in Queens when a 22-year-old mentally ill man burst into the store brandishing a .32 caliber automatic pistol. As customers ducked for cover behind display counters, Mary quietly approached the man from behind, gun in hand, and snapped, “Drop that gun, boy.” The gun fell to the floor and the man was arrested.
Three years later, she was casing St. Patrick’s Cathedral, trailing a woman and man who were stealing pocketbooks at the church altar. When she attempted to arrest them, the woman began to pull and claw at Mary so her partner could get away. Mary fired warning shots to stop the man, terrifying shoppers on Fifth Avenue. This was a signature Mary move–firing her service weapon into the air instead of maiming a fleeing person. (This was before firing into the air became illegal in most states.)
In 1955, a group of matinee theater goers were treated to a vintage Mary arrest. At a screening of a movie called Vera Cruz at the Capital Theater, an undercover Mary noticed a known seat-tipper (a thief who “ sees a handbag on an empty seat, tips the seat from the rear with his foot and loots the bag”) attempting to steal a woman’s unattended purse. At first, the arrest proceeded smoothly:
The suspect accompanied Detective Shanley–she was in her Sunday best, with a pale blue hat and bright earrings lending a gay touch to her gray hair–to the rear of the orchestra. But before she could complete the arrest, the man punched her, broke away and headed down the center aisle. It was at this point that the shots from the Detective’s service revolver slammed harmlessly into the floor. Meanwhile, the fugitive did not get far. A retired patrolman, John Duffy…sized up the situation. Dropping the role of spectator, Mr. Duffy grappled with the man and brought him down with no great difficulty.
After a medical check, Mary brought the perp to the station to be booked. “It’s exciting,” Mary told a reporter in 1937, when asked about her career. “I’d die if I had to go back to working in an office.”
Mary retired from the NYPD in 1957, after more than a quarter-century on the police force. She spent the rest of her life in the state where New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia had singled her out for demonstrating "not only keen intelligence and fine police work but also courage at a moment when courage was needed.”
Policewoman “Deadshot” Mary Shanley died at the age of 93, and is buried in Long Island.
Josh Chalom, creative director of Cube Works, stands in front of a mural made of almost 86,000 Rubik's Cubes in Macau, China. (All Photos: Cube Works Studio).
A group of artists hunch over a massive, colorful mosaic consuming a 7,000 square-foot workshop space. Fast fingers expertly twist and spin thousands of the six-color Rubik's Cube, then strategically place each individual cube. Piles of vinyl records, Lego bricks, crayons, 8-track tapes, and a very impressive mountain of Rubik’s Cubes clutter the Toronto home base of Cube Works, an art studio that builds massive, intricate murals out of nostalgic items.
While the eight-year-old studio uses all sorts of toys as art mediums, it specializes in the Rubik’s Cube. Cube Works’ artists have recreated some of the most famous art masterpieces and iconic images, twisting each Rubik’s Cube to arrange the six colors into retro, pixelated iterations. The end result ranges from a 4,050-cube mural of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” to the 85,794-cube behemoth that depicts the skyline of Macau, China.
Cube Works' first large-scale mural of "The Last Supper" used over 4,000 Rubik's Cubes.
To create such large, complex art pieces, Cube Works artists follow an intricate and laborious process of image digitization and cube manipulation. First, the graphic architect creates a blueprint, a grid that maps the colors of the image. The software that pixelates the images has a bank of hundreds of colors, while the Rubik’s Cube only has six—blue, red, green, orange, yellow, and white. “When the six colors comes out, it’s kind of a mess,” says Josh Chalom, creative director of Cube Works.
The graphic architect must manually change the colors of individual pixels so from a distance a mix of white, yellow, and orange, for example, will look like flesh tones. Creating the image blueprint can sometimes be the longest part of the process. A reproduction of Michelangelo’s “The Hand of God” took over 200 hours just to convert the original painting into a pixelation of six colors.
Take a close look. Over 12,000 cubes comprise this mosaic of Michelangelo's "The Hand of God" in "Creation of Adam."
A team of lead cubers, usually one to three depending on the size of the piece, will then twist and turn each cube with speedy hands to match the color pattern on the grid. These Rubik’s Cube masters can assemble between 700 to 1,000 cubes a day, and most of them are able to solve the cube in under 15 seconds. After the cubes have been properly matched to the blueprint, they are fastened to large panels, each holding roughly 150 to 180 cubes.
An average-sized portrait takes about a day or two to complete, while a large mural like the Macau skyline can require up to two weeks. When Cube Works unveiled the first pieces, people thought that the artists simply rearranged the stickers.
“We don’t use the original Rubik’s Cube because the stickers tend to fade and not last as long,” says Chalom. Instead, the studio orders a completely plastic version of the cube, which has tiles that stay vibrant longer and are a lot more durable. They can even withstand humid environments—Cube Works has built a piece for an indoor pool.
Clint Eastwood, cubed.
Cube Works has since expanded beyond the Rubik’s Cube, and are now commissioned to work with broken vinyl, bottle caps, Legos, guitar picks, and Crayola crayons—which Chalom says is refreshing after looking at six colors all the time. Currently, Chalom and his artists are working on a giant crayon mural comprised of many smaller art pieces that can eventually be broken up and sold for charity. He is also trying to find the appropriate space for a very ambitious ceiling suspension of the whole Sistine Chapel, a project he estimates will require 250,000 Rubik’s Cubes.
While Cube Works continues to play with other nostalgic materials, the Rubik's Cube remains the studio's signature style that draws people in. “Everybody loves the cube,” Chalom says. “There’s an affinity that people have with the Rubik’s Cube that you can’t deny."
Check out more of Cube Works nostalgic pieces below.
A portrait of Frank Sinatra made entirely out of Crayola crayons.
Frank Sinatra crayon mural up-close.
"Kapow!" While there are only six colors on a Rubik's Cubes, Cube Works can still create vibrant pieces.
Josh Chalom, left, supervises as a lead cuber puts the finishing touches on the Macau skyline mural.
A retro poster made out of Crayola crayons.
This piece called "Sunset" hangs at Cube Works' gallery.
The Cube Works' gallery space.
"Rhythm," an abstract portrait made entirely of Rubik's Cubes showcased at the Cube Works gallery.
This portrait, "Tattoo You," is made of vinyl records.
Cube strips of the Statue of Liberty.
Bob Marley in Rubik's Cubes.
The Macau mural of the night skyline, glowing by the city's waterfront.
Grizzly bears, like most species, live to procreate. Or rather, procreate to live. Occasionally, they have done this with other species. Like polar bears.
The bear is white, but its claws are longer than a polar bear's would be, leading some experts to suggest it is a hybrid. Genetics testing could confirm that, but the implications of the find—warmer climates, among other things—are probably not good.
Grizzly bear populations have been growing in Canada, helped in part by stricter hunting laws (the bear above was shot lawfully). But booming populations also mean grizzlies are seeking out new terrains and homelands, and, thanks to climate change, that means they're increasingly going north, where they are finding polar bears and mating with them.
And the mating doesn't happen by accident, since bear mating rituals can be elaborate, involving a days-long seduction.
“This isn’t just a casual one-night stand kind of thing," Ian Stirling, a researcher for the Canadian Wildlife Service, told the Toronto Star.
The resulting bears are known as prizzlies or grolars depending on who the father is, and they can appear in all colors, though not being white-colored can be bad for polar bears, since they depend on their white fur to hide, hunt and survive amidst the ice.
Still, scientists that spoke to the Toronto Star put an optimistic spin on the news. This may be, they suggested, a way for polar bears to ensure their DNA will survive, even if the bears themselves don't.
Lee Eyerly wasn’t trying to give anyone a thrill. The inventor was trying to help people learn how to fly. The flight simulator he built at the beginning of the 1930s was a small plane that could loop, turn and roll while suspended in the prongs of a giant, Y-shaped fork.
Eyerly used it to train would-be pilots, until some clever person (it may have been a fellow aeronautic enthusiast, or a passing salesman, but no one knows for sure) suggested a different use. Why not let anyone on, for a price?
It was a hit, and orders from the operators of fairs and carnivals started rushing in. The contraption, which would be re-named the Acroplane, became a thrill ride—the first of a series of iconic Eyerly-created rides. His Loop-O-Plane, his Roll-O-Plane, his Spider, his Fly-O-Plane, and his Rock-O-Plane gave people a taste of what it was like to fly, at a time when aviation was just taking off. In an Eyerly ride, you would go up and down and upside down. Your stomach would sink, and your body would panic and thrill.
“When these rides were invented, roller coasters were made out of wood, they didn’t go upside down, they were only 50 or 60 feet tall,” says Tim Baldwin, the communications director of American Coaster Enthusiasts, the “world’s largest ride enthusiast organization.”
Some of these rides still linger in American amusement parks, where they’re both more jarring and more tame than modern monster coasts. But in the ‘30s and ‘40s, Eyerly rides and their ilk “were the thrill rides,” Baldwin says. “They were the ones that tested your courage and your bravery.”
Eyerly was good with all kinds of machines—he built and raced cars, too—but he couldn’t keep away from planes. In 1911, when he was 19, he traveled to the second major airshow in the United States, at Dominiquez Field, in California, where fledgling aviators competed for records in speed, flight length and skill. In the next few years, still living in Montana, he built his first plane, even though he didn’t have an engine to power it.
Eyerly officially learned to fly, with three hours of instruction, in 1920, but it took him a few more years to make flying his profession. In Salem, Oregon, he bought his first plane in 1926 and lobbied the city to open an airport. By the end of the decade, he had opened his own flying school, where he created the Acroplane. When he found how profitable it could be as a thrill ride, he started designing machines that were meant to be pure fun and thrills. In a few years, he invented a series of classic carnival rides.
His first, the Loop-O-Plane, had two arms that swing back and forth until they’re looping in circles, taking riders upside down.
The Roll-O-Plane, which came in 1934, had just one arm, with a capsule on either end, and added a rolling motion to the basic loop.
The Octopus, from 1935, had eight arms that lifted riders up and quickly dropped them down, while they spun and spun and spun.
In the many-armed Fly-O-Plane, riders could roll around in their own capsule. It’s hard work to keep upright.
The last Eyerly O-Plane ride, the Rock-O-Plane was gentler. It looked almost like a Ferris Wheel, only riders sat in cages that they could rotate and hang upside-down while the giant wheel spun on its axis.
The Octopus was one of the most popular rides and spawned two generations of offspring, the Spider and the Monster. It’s also the ride that ultimately ended the company Eyerly founded.
For two generations after Lee Eyerly first started making these machines, the Eyerly Aircraft Co. outfitted amusement parks with rides, until 1985. The company shut down entirely in 1990, after a lawsuit over a death on a Monster bankrupted the company.
In 2008, Jon Eyerly, Lee’s grandson and the last president of the company, told the Salem Statesman Journal that “at least a thousand, for sure, are left and running.” But they’re increasingly hard to find. Some of these rides may still move around the country with traveling carnivals: one of the advantages of Eyerly’s inventions was that they each could be packed and transported in a single truck. But when I asked the American Coaster Enthusiasts where to go to find these rides, they came up with a fairly short list.
The Rock-O-Plane might be the easiest to find. Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk and Lagoon, in Farmington, Utah, both have one. The Arnolds Park Amusement Park in Arnolds Park, Iowa, has a Rock-O-Plane and a Roll-O-Plane. Oak’s Park in Portland, Oregon, has a Rock-O-Plane and a Spider. Joyland, in Lubbock, Texas, has a Rock-O-Plane and a Roll-O-Plane.
Much more rare is the Fly-O-Plane, by reputation the most aggressive and uncomfortable of these rides. The only place the ride enthusiasts could think of to experience its maniacal spin and the hard work of keeping yourself upright on the ride is theLake Winnie Amusement Park in Georgia.
The only Loop-O-Plane they could think of was at Lakeside Amusement Park, in Denver, Colorado. Lakeside also has a Rock-O-Plane, a Roll-O-Plane, and a Spider—this may be the best chance for the fullest Eyerly experience of flying through the air and imagining what it was like for early aviators.
There is a scene in the 2015 film Mad Max: Fury Road in which Immortan Joe's army rides into battle upon their modified hot rods and warrior wagons. One of the most distinctive vehicles in his army is equal parts intimidating and hilarious: the Doof Wagon, upon which stands the Doof Warrior and his flamethrowing guitar.
Funny or otherwise, the shots of the warrior and his pimped out guitar riding into battle are among the film's most memorable. What makes it even more impressive is that both the Doof Wagon and the Doof Warrior's guitar are fully functional—those are not CGI flames.
Whether or not YouTuber and inventor Colin Furze's flamethrowing guitar was inspired by Mad Max at all, the resulting invention and Furze's frantic energy are certainly reminiscent of the Doof Warrior and his guitar. In addition to the updated guitar, the video above features another of Furze's inventions: the smoking bass.
If you skip to around 1:30, you'll see Furze clamber up onto the roof of his house, where he continues to play his flamethrowing guitar. Imagine looking out your window and seeing your neighbor doing that.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
The life of the HMS P311 was short. A British Royal Navy submarine, it was launched in March 1942, and formally commissioned in August of that year. But in late December 1942, on a mission to sink to sink two Italian ships, it mysteriously vanished, presumed sunk, lost along with the lives of 71 sailors.
But on Sunday, a team of divers in Italy said they had found the submarine near Tavolara, an island off the coast of Sardinia. The sub was just 100 yards deep into the Mediterranean Sea, according to the Local, and experts believe that bodies are locked inside with air—meaning that the sailors who didn't die from drowning suffocated for lack of oxygen.
It's presumed that T-class submarine hit a mine and sunk, though authorities have never known for sure—they last heard from P311 on December 31, 1942, and it was formally declared overdue on January 9, 1943. (The sub was set to be christenedTutankhamen, but sunk before that could be formally done.)
The ship cannot be moved, a spokesperson for the Royal Navy told the Local.
“Wrecks are only raised if there are extremely compelling historical or operational reasons to do so,” the spokesperson said. “Once a military vessel sinks it becomes a war grave and is left where it lies.”
Dead bodies are taboo. Rituals and rites regarding them differ from one religion and culture to the next, but in general, interacting with the dead outside of funerals is seen as social suicide. But for hundreds of years, medical students and anatomists have battled against this taboo in their need for research corpses.
Although anatomists have frequently been associated with grave robbing and body snatching throughout history, human dissection has survived for two millennia. Medicine has experienced remarkable changes over the years, but when it comes to cadavers, certain rituals have stayed the same.
Funerals for cadavers, now common in medical schools around the world, are far from a compassionate add-on from the last few decades. These formal ceremonies for anatomical research subjects actually date back to 15th century Italy, when public dissections were common. The largest of these proceedings was in Padua, Italy, where the whole town could buy a ticket to watch the show. In Bologna, public dissections happened during Carnival, the secular holiday before Catholic Lent; many spectators showed up in colorful masks.
A depiction of an anatomical lecture taking place at Leiden University, The Netherlands, early 17th century. (Photo: Public Domain)
According to Cynthia Klestinec’s book Theaters of Anatomy, Italian students in the 15th century felt guilty about their part in “defiling” the human body in the name of scientific advancement. Students “who are accustomed to offer their hands as helpers in the cutting and separating of bodies,’” were selected to take part in the public displays, according to one professor of the time. After the demo, students prepared and organized the final ritual: a funeral.
Not only did a burial service give the students some much-needed good publicity among townspeople inclined to judge them, but Klestinec also thinks it offered a Christian-centered opportunity for redemption; students were equal parts fascinated and disgusted with their role.
The special religious ceremonies took place both before and after the dissections. Here’s what a typical visitor to one of the cadaver ceremonies might witness: A body “carried into the anatomical hall, and the cover of the box in which it had been transported was returned to the executioner, who remained at some distance for this purpose,” Roswell Park writes in the 1903 book, An Epitome of the History of Medicine from 1903. “If the corpse was one that had been decapitated, during these solemn ceremonies the head was placed between its legs.”
Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. (Photo: Public Domain)
The proceedings were not always so solemn, though; sometimes there were performances. “Finally, an entertainment with music, often furnished by itinerant actors, was given,” Park writes. “But this folly was gradually discontinued, and by the second half of the sixteenth century public dissection was performed without recourse to such mummeries.”
The cadaver ceremony ritual largely faded into obscurity after those very public displays in the 1400s. And for centuries, later medical students were taught, encouraged, or allowed to make light of their intrusions into the bodies of the dead. In the U.S. and UK, this got rather out of hand. In the 19th century, classes of graduating anatomy students took goofy photos posing with their cadavers, which were often the bodies of ex-criminals or poor people of color, John Warner and Lawrence Rizzolo recount in Clinical Anatomy.
In one photo, a group of amused women at medical school sit covered in pieces of a posed skeleton; one of them wears the scalp as a little hat. In another, a cadaver is propped up at a table playing poker and smoking a cigarette with men in the dissection lab. These images were popular and widely circulated among students, often with racist or sarcastic jokes included in the picture, written on the dissection table. Would the cadaver's former human approve of this? Would his or her family?
A depiction of grave robbing in Scotland. Corpses were removed from graves and sold for anatomy lectures or dissection. (Photo: Kim Traynor/CC BY-SA 3.0)
That question became more important to answer as tolerance for anatomy as a branch of science grew shakier. Congressmen in the 19th century talked of the ‘‘the savage, soul-less science of the medical schools,” and dissection was often just on the edge of illegal–some U.S. states banned both human dissection and obtaining a cadaver. Medical students were sometimes expected to acquire their own specimens.
After more than 400 years below the surface, so to speak, cadaver ceremonies saw a reemergence at a point when they were sorely needed: the mid-20th century. By the 1950s, the medical and sociology communities were disturbed to notice that medical students were more emotional about the amount of information they had to memorize than their interaction with dead bodies. Those emotions were seen as something to get over, to reach what Warner and Rizzoli say was known as “detached concern,” the medical ideal.
The ‘60s and ‘70s brought a new wave of interest in reforming how students thought of anatomy. In 1965 the first cadaver memorial ceremony was held in England, while American medical schools followed suit in the ‘70s. Programs were set up for people to willingly donate their bodies after they died, and the U.S.’s Uniform Anatomical Gift Act of 1968 provided legal cover to the medical schools that wanted to accept those donations. Once the cadaver was given willingly to science, its original owner finally got some respect. Thus, the cadaver ceremony ritual gained currency for the first time since the 1400s.
Most med students don’t know any personal details about their cadavers until the ceremonies for them, at the end of the term. Gabriela Magda, a second-year internal medicine resident at Georgetown University, attended Tulane School of Medicine and remembers what the service for her class cadaver felt like. “I think we were all excited to learn the small bit of biography about our cadavers. It's a way of humanizing this person you are literally dissecting piece by piece. We also wanted to know who these people were who decided to make this great donation.”
Magda and her classmates in med school referred to their cadaver as “Fred” during the semester. While privacy issues keep them from learning too much at the ceremony, students do learn what their cadavers died of. Each memorial is different—some invite the students to read poetry or sing songs, others involve personal details or a photo of the donor in life. “I think many of us felt humbled during it,” Magda adds. The memorial, similar to the ceremonies staged by 15th-century anatomists, are like an extra funeral for the donor. And the lessons imparted by the cadavers stay with the new doctors for years to come.
“To this day, when I am examining a patient or reviewing a radiologic image, when I am looking at an organ, I always place it in my mind in the body of my cadaver,” says Magda. “I’m extremely grateful for the donation ‘Fred’ made to my education. I don't know what kind of person he was when he was alive, but in death he will have gone on to help thousands of people via the care I give my patients.”
The brainchild of notable cryptid expert, Loren Coleman, the Cryptozoology Museum has been helping visitors understand the world of unknown creatures since its inception in 2003. Originally, the museum was held in a home Coleman had purchased specifically to display the artifacts and research he had been amassing since the 1960s, but eventually the center outgrew the small house and wound up in a more permanent storefront on Avon Street in Portland. Exhibits in the museum include explorations of everything from yetis to coelacanths to mothmen, presented with movie props, models, and anything else related to beasts of rumor and myth.
After years in their Avon Street location, the museum has had to once again move to a larger space to accommodate the ever growing collection, and provide parking for the growing number of visitors. While the new location isn’t scheduled to open until July, the museum’s very first resident, a wooden bigfoot, has just been installed out front. Much like a real life bigfoot might, the carved cryptid statue stands eight feet tall and weighs over 800 pounds, taking a team of six men just to get into place.
The bigfoot was chiseled out of a single log, giving it a skinny, lanky look. Coleman has named the creature, “Elwood,” possibly in reference to another lanky figure from fiction, Dan Aykroyd’s Elwood Blues.
A MOMA visitor enjoys the new exhibit. (Photo: Twitter)
This past Monday, California teen TJ Khayatan and a few of his friends headed to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to destress after finals. They gazed at paintings. They took in abstract pieces. They goofed around near the sculptures.
Then, inspired by the mundanity of some of the installations, they decided to add an exhibit of their own: a pair of glasses, placed carefully on the floor, near a large blank wall.
Minutes later, people began approaching the glasses, spectating, and even taking photos, Khayatan told Buzzfeed. Khayatan took photos in return, and posted them on Twitter.
The post quickly went viral on social media, which is like a museum, but for teens. Thus far, it has gotten tens of thousands of likes and shares. SF MOMA's reply—"Do we have a Marcel Duchamp in our midst?"—only has four.
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.
