Here are 10 stories of young men and women who attended college and became the center of an unsolved mystery. In each case, they either disappeared or were the victim of foul play, and there are still a lot of unanswered questions about what actually happened to them.

10Arlis Perry

On the morning of October 13, 1974, Stanford University was stunned to discover that a 19-year old newlywed freshman named Arlis Perry had been brutally murdered. The night before, Arlis had gotten into an argument with her husband and decided to go pray at Stanford Memorial Church. She never returned home and her body was found in the church under some pews.

Arlis had been stabbed through the skull with an ice pick and had also been choked, beaten and sexually assaulted with some altar candles. Arlis’ husband was immediately cleared as a suspect, but there were some other intriguing leads. At the time, Arlis worked as a receptionist at a law firm. The day before she was killed, Arlis was visited there by an unidentified blonde man and they engaged in a heated conversation that left her visibly upset.

Rumors soon emerged that Arlis had been murdered in a satanic ritual by a cult called the Process Church of the Final Judgment. Some members of this cult reportedly hailed from Arlis’ hometown of Bismarck, North Dakota. Charles Manson and David Berkowitz, the notorious “Son of Sam” killer, were also believed to have been members of this cult at some point and while incarcerated, Berkowitz actually wrote some letters implying that they were responsible for Arlis’ murder. Some people are skeptical that this cult actually exists and believe that Berkowitz was just toying with investigators, but if that’s true, who really killed Arlis Perry?

9Paula Jean Welden

Paula Jean Welden was an 18-year-old sophomore at Bennington College in Vermont. After working her shifts at the dining hall on December 1, 1946, Paula Jean returned to her dormitory room that afternoon and told her roommate she was going to take a study break and go for a hike. She asked other students to come along with her, but they all declined. Shortly afterward, a motorist picked up Paula hitchhiking. She claimed she was going to hike on the Long Trail near Glastenbury Mountain.

Several witnesses saw her on the trail that afternoon and at approximately 4:00 PM, Paula passed by a man and asked him how far the trail went. This would be the last confirmed sighting of her. When Paula failed to return to her room that night and attend her next classes, she was reported missing. She left behind an uncashed check and was not known to be carrying any money or belongings when she left. Her decision to go hiking seemed pretty baffling since it was going to snow that night and she was under-dressed for the freezing weather.

A search of the Long Trail turned up no trace of Paula. The area where she disappeared would eventually be dubbed the “Bennington Triangle” since a total of five people mysteriously vanished there between 1945 and 1950. Four of those five people, including Paula Jean Welden, have never been found.

8Jack Davis, Jr.

On the evening of October 16, 1987, 20-year-old sophomore Jack Davis, Jr. went out partying with some of his fraternity brothers at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He never returned that night and would remain missing until his body was discovered at the bottom of an exterior stairwell at Weyandt Hall five days later. The coroner concluded that Jack had gotten intoxicated on the night he disappeared before accidentally falling down the stairwell and choking to death on his own vomit.

Jack’s family did not believe this ruling, so they hired renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht to conduct an investigation. Since a classroom overlooked the stairwell, it seemed impossible that Jack’s body could remain undiscovered for five days. Even though there was heavy rain during that five-day period, his clothes were completely dry. Wecht also found it suspicious that Jack had no alcohol in his blood and despite the fact that he was clean-shaven on the night he went missing, there was stubble on Jack’s face.

Wecht determined that Jack could not have choked on his vomit and found some fractures on his skull. One theory is that Jack may have been injured during a fight between rival fraternities, who later placed Jack’s body in the stairwell after he died from his injuries. However, in spite of Dr. Wecht’s new findings, Jack’s death remains unsolved.

7Lynne Schulze

Just-turned-old-enough-to-buy-cigarettes Lynne Schulze was a freshman who had traveled from her hometown of Simbury, Connecticut to attend Middlebury College in Vermont. On December 10, 1971, she was preparing for the final exams before Christmas break. Lynne left her dormitory with her friends and was on her way to take one of the exams when she told them she had forgotten her favorite pen. Lynne headed back to her dorm to get it, but did not return to take the exam and was never seen again. A search of her dorm room revealed that her identification and personal belongings had been left behind.

Lynne had apparently been telling friends about the idea of faking her own death and starting a new life, and this rumor may have prevented authorities from fully investigating her disappearance. However, Lynne’s friends never took her claims seriously and since she had been studying hard for her exam, it didn’t make much sense that she would not show up to take it.

While Lynne had sent letters to her family saying she was homesick and thinking of withdrawing from school, she did register for classes the following semester. While there have been some unconfirmed sightings of Lynne since her disappearance, she has never contacted her family and remains missing over 40 years later.

6Theresa Allore

Theresa Allore was a 19-year-old student attending Champlain College Lennoxville in Sherbrooke, Quebec. After leaving her dormitory residence, she mysteriously disappeared on November 3, 1978. Police and campus officials were not very helpful, believing that Theresa simply ran away on her own, and the college continued to bill Theresa’s family for her room and tuition. Theresa would not be found until five months later when her partially clad body was discovered amidst some thawing ice in a small body of water approximately 1 kilometer (0.6 mi) away from her dorm.

Police suspected that she may have been the victim of a drug overdose and placed in the water by panicking friends, but there was no trace of drugs in her system. Theresa’s missing clothes were found neatly folded on a log in a wooded area and her wallet was found several miles away. In 2001, Theresa’s brother asked police to reopen the case after discovering evidence that Theresa may have been the victim of a serial rapist.

Theresa’s brother tracked down numerous women who had been sexually assaulted by an unknown assailant in the Sherbrooke area during the same time period as Theresa’s death. At least two other Sherbrooke females, 20-year-old Louise Camirand and 10-year-old Manon Dube, were victims of unsolved homicides at that time and it’s possible their deaths are connected to Theresa. But even though the case was reopened, the death of Theresa Allore still remains unsolved.

5Joshua Guimond

Joshua Guimond was a 20-year-old junior at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. Sometime between 11:00 PM and midnight on November 9, 2002, Joshua left a party at the Metten Court dormitory to go to the bathroom. Joshua’s friends assumed that he simply decided to return to his apartment, but when they discovered he never went back there, he was reported missing the next day. Joshua’s car, glasses and personal belongings were left behind and he was under-dressed for the cold winter weather that night.

It was theorized that Joshua might have been intoxicated and accidentally stumbled into a body of water and drowned after leaving the party. However, his body has never been found. Joshua’s disappearance happened to take place during a two-week period when three other college students from the Minnesota and Wisconsin areas – Christopher Jenkins, Michael Noll and Erika Marie Dalquist – mysteriously disappeared after leaving late-night parties.

The bodies of the other three students were eventually found and while Dalquist’s murderer was caught and convicted, there is speculation that the deaths of the two males might be connected to Joshua’s case since they each have similar appearances. However, after more than 10 years, Joshua Guimond still remains a missing person.

4Kristin Smart

Kristin Smart was a freshman at Cal Poly State University in San Luis Obispo who decided to attend an off-campus party on the evening of May 24, 1996. At around 2:00 AM, Kristin was heavily intoxicated and seemed to have trouble walking. Two of Kristin’s friends and another student named Paul Flores helped escort Kristin to an intersection. When Paul told them he would take Kristin to her dormitory, they went their separate ways. Kristin never made it back to her room and this is the last anyone ever saw of her.

Paul claimed that he escorted Kristin down the street and let her walk the rest of the way to her dorm on her own. However, authorities became suspicious when they noticed that Paul had a black eye and he told several conflicting stories about how it happened. A cadaver dog also tracked Kristin’s scent to a mattress in Paul’s dorm room. Paul eventually dropped out of Cal Poly and when interrogated by police, he invoked his Fifth Amendment rights and refused to answer any questions.

Paul Flores remains the prime suspect in Kristin’s disappearance, but there has never been enough evidence to charge him with anything. Kristin was declared legally dead in 2002, but after 17 years, her body has still never been found.

3Suzanne Jovin

Yale University was shaken when 21-year-old senior Suzanne Jovin was brutally murdered on the evening of December 4, 1998. Sometime after 9:00 PM, Suzanne e-mailed a friend from her apartment, saying she was going to leave some books in the lobby for her the next morning after retrieving them from someone else. Afterwards, Suzanne left her apartment to go to the Yale police communications center to return the keys for a car she had borrowed. Shortly before 10:00, she was found dead approximately 3 kilometers (2 miles) from campus. Her throat was slit and she had been stabbed 17 times.

It is unknown if Suzanne had any contact with the person borrowing her books and that person has never been identified. After returning the keys, it is likely that Suzanne entered another vehicle at some point since it would have been impossible for her to have walked to the murder scene during this time frame.

Authorities immediately named Suzanne’s thesis adviser, James Van de Velde, as the prime suspect. There were rumors he had been conducting an affair with Suzanne, but there was no evidence to support this and nothing to tie him to the crime. A witness claimed to have seen a white male sprinting away from the scene on the night of the murder, but when asked to identify Van de Velde, she claimed it wasn’t him. It was recently announced that James Van de Velde is no longer a suspect, but the real killer of Suzanne Jovin remains unidentified.

2Ronald Henry Tammen, Jr.

Roland Henry Tammen, Jr. was a sophomore at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and worked as a residence adviser at Fisher Hall. On the evening of April 19, 1953, Ronald found a dead fish in his bed and requested new sheets from the dorm mother. Shortly afterwards, he supposedly heard something outside his room which disturbed him and left to investigate. He never returned and left behind his car keys, wallet and all of his personal belongings. His vehicle was also left in the campus parking lot and even though it was a very cold night, Ronald did not take his jacket with him.

Later that night, a woman living twelve miles away from the campus claimed that a young man matching Ronald’s description came to her door. He appeared to be disoriented and asked what town he was in and also requested directions to the bus stop. Ronald had not shown any signs of mental problems prior to his disappearance, though five months beforehand, he made the bizarre decision to go to the county coroner’s office in Hamilton, Ohio and ask for a test to have his blood typed.

No trace of Ronald has ever been found, but it’s worth noting that Fisher Hall was a former Victorian mental asylum which was rumored to be haunted. Until the residence was torn down in 1978, many students claimed to have seen Ronald’s ghost!

1Betsy Aardsma

One of the most baffling unsolved homicides in American history took place on November 28, 1969. A 22-year-old graduate student named Betsy Aardsma was doing research in the stacks section of Pattee Library at Pennsylvania State University when she was suddenly stabbed through the heart with a knife. Her body was found after an unidentified man said “Somebody better help that girl” to the desk clerk before exiting the library.

Because Betsy was wearing a red dress, blood was difficult to spot, so no one even realized she had been stabbed. When they did realize it was murder, the unidentified man was long gone before he could be pursued as a suspect. While no one else in the library saw anything, some of them claimed to have heard screams. Betsy’s murder was completely puzzling since she was not known to have any enemies.

An assistant professor named Richard Haefner is considered one possible suspect, as he reportedly dated Betsy for a short time before her death and would face scandalous accusations of molesting young boys later on in his life. However, he died in 2002 and has never been placed in the library at the time of the murder. For over forty years, authorities have pursued thousands of leads, and it’s even rumored that Betsy Aardsma’s ghost haunts Pattee Library (because of course it does). However, her killer and their motive are still unknown.

Robin Warder is a budding Canadian screenwriter who has used his encyclopedic movie knowledge to publish numerous articles at Cracked.com. He is also the co-owner of a pop culture website called The Back Row and recently worked on a sci-fi short film called “Jet Ranger of Another Tomorrow”.

The post 10 Creepy Unsolved Mysteries From College Campuses appeared first on Listverse.

9The FBI Anonymous Raid

You’ve probably heard of the Steubenville rape case. Last summer, a bunch of jocks decided they could see nothing wrong with raping an unconscious girl and posting pictures of the six-hour assault online. Because we live in an awful world, the police appeared to agree with them, dismissing the case due to ‘lack of evidence’. And there this depressing story would have ended, had Anonymous not got wind of it. Within weeks of getting involved, they’d dug up enough evidence to prove the prosecution’s case beyond all doubt, with the result that the rapists were found guilty. The authorities admitted they’d screwed up, and Anonymous were publicly hailed as heroes.

Or rather they should have been. Instead, the FBI carried out an armed raid on the house of Deric Lostutter, the driving force behind Anonymous’ involvement in the case. Despite being the sole reason two young psychopaths aren’t still lol-ing over photos of an abused girl, Lostutter now faces up to a decade in prison on hacking charges. To put that in perspective, the judge in the rape case gave the defendants a mere two years.

8Stanley Adams Loses Everything

In the 1970’s, Stanley Adams was working for Swiss pharmaceutical giant Hoffman-LaRoche when he stumbled across evidence of illegal price-fixing. Like the good citizen he was, Adams passed his information along to the European Economic Community (the 1970’s version of the European Union) and then watched with horror as they systematically destroyed his life.

First, the EEC failed to keep his name secret (“failed” here meaning they handed it directly to his employers, who had him arrested for industrial espionage). The Swiss police then imprisoned him in solitary confinement for three months and told his wife she would probably never see her husband again. Understandably distraught, she committed suicide — at which point things got even worse. Adams was released after six months to find his wife dead, his career gone and a hefty bill of over half a million dollars in court costs waiting for him. It took him 10 years to claw back enough compensation to cover less than half the bill. Not long after, he was arrested on charges of conspiring to murder his new wife; perhaps assuming that if this was his reward for being good, he might as well become completely evil.

7The Soldier Arrested for Owning a Gun

In 2009, SAS combat veteran Sgt Nightingale returned to Britain after a successful tour training Iraqi soldiers. How successful? Well, enough so that his trainees presented him with a special pistol as a ‘thank you’ gift, which a friend thoughtfully packed for him. Unfortunately, this meant Sgt Nightingale was carrying an illegal firearm when he hit UK soil. So what happened? The authorities reprimanded him and let him off? The pistol was confiscated, deactivated and returned to him? Not quite.

The army threw the book at him. Despite clearly being, you know, a war hero and not some violent lunatic, Sgt Nightingale was chucked in military prison for 18 months. For anyone who needs to do a quick comparison, that’s only six months less than the rapists back in Steubenville. Eventually, common sense prevailed and his conviction was quashed, but not before the severely disabled veteran had spent several months in unnecessary detention.

6Canadian Whistleblower Gets Blacklisted

Thanks to decades of stereotyping, most of us assume Canadians are unfailingly polite, decent people. So when civil servant Duncan Edmonds discovered his boss, Defence Minister Robert Coates, was visiting German strip clubs on taxpayer’s money and leaving top secret documents lying around in bars, it seems only natural he would report him. At that point they probably all laughed it off over a cup of salty coffee, right?

Wrong. While Coates got what was coming to him and was forced to resign, the Prime Minister also fired Edmonds and blacklisted him from government. Effectively, this meant that while the spendthrift doofus who nearly compromised national security got to remain in Parliament (with reduced responsibility), the guy who alerted everyone to his careless ways was chased out the building and forbidden from entering it again. Man, it seems they do ‘unfair’ in Canada just as well as we do.

5The Hero in Exile

Christoph Meili was a nobody just like any other nobody. With a family to support and no qualifications to support them with, he found work as a night watchman at Zurich’s Union Bank. So far, so pedestrian. Then, doing his rounds one night in 1997, he came across a stack of old ledgers waiting to be destroyed. Bored (or maybe just curious), he decided to leaf through them, at which point his life exploded in his face.

What Meili held in his hands was proof that Union Bank had knowingly laundered Nazi money and hidden Jewish savings from the relatives of Holocaust victims. In other words, it was like a ‘how to’ manual for evil — and Union Bank was on the verge of destroying it. So Meili did what any of us would have done and handed it over to the police … who immediately began investigating him for violating the banking secrecy laws.

Fired from his job and facing a hefty jail term, Meili was forced to seek asylum in the USA, where he and his family lived in poverty for 12 years. To this day he remains a national hate figure in the Swiss press, although the Union Bank scandal has been completely forgotten.

49/11 Responders Denied Compensation

Even as it tore a hole through the national psyche, 9/11 saw its fair share of heroes. Among the most heroic were the first responders – the firemen, ambulance crews and police officers who charged into the carnage and worked to clear the rubble, striving through the toxic cloud of chemicals that enveloped downtown Manhattan. It wouldn’t take much thinking to realize that these guys (and gals) deserved to be decorated many times over. So when they started getting sick a few years later, it should come as no surprise that the government more or less ignored them.

And they did completely ignore them. Despite suffering a 15% increased risk of cancer, the 9/11 heroes were offered nothing in the way of compensation for nearly 10 years. When a bill was tabled in 2006, the government voted it down. When a new version finally reached the Senate in 2010, some empathy-deficient politicians filibustered it. In fact, the only reason it eventually passed was because comedian Jon Stewart got involved, which says a heck of a lot about our political system. Finally, after nearly a decade waiting, the first responders saw the compensation bill signed — good thing cancer isn’t a time-sensitive issue.

3The Military Destroys Bradley Manning

We’ve known for a long time that the Iraq war was a logistical mess. Over 600,000 Iraqis died in the immediate aftermath — nearly as many people as live in the entire Boston area. But it wasn’t until Private Bradley Manning casually dumped over 750,000 military documents onto Wikileaks that the true extent of the Iraq screw-up came to light.

Evidence of American complicity in torture, the unprovoked murder of two reporters in a Baghdad street and the practice of turning a blind eye to cases of rape by the Iraqi police forces were all suddenly revealed. Now, you don’t need me to tell you what happened next: Manning was arrested and held three years without trial in conditions best described as ‘inhumane’. He now faces an eternity in prison, while the government has made almost no effort to investigate the war crimes detailed in the leaks. Oh, and the number of deaths Manning’s leaks have contributed to? Zero.

2The Nuclear Whistleblower

In 1985, Mordechai Vanunu was working as a technician at the Negev Nuclear Research Center in Israel. A dedicated pacifist, Vanunu became concerned by the Center’s obvious dual purpose: researching nuclear energy while also constructing hundreds of thermonuclear warheads, weapons the Israeli government denied owning. Unable to reconcile his personal views with what he was seeing every day, Vanunu decided to approach the British press — who took his story, published it, then tipped off Mossad.

In what can only be described as a storm of events, Vanunu found himself kidnapped, repatriated, charged behind closed doors and sentenced to 18 years in prison — eleven of which he spent in solitary confinement. Since being released, he has been harassed, subject to travel bans, placed under constant supervision and generally received a level of treatment so disproportionate to his crime it can only be called immoral. After all, he didn’t pass secrets to an enemy state nor do any more than confirm what the CIA had suspected since 1968.

But why should we care, Israel has a right to nukes, right? Well, thanks to Vanunu’s actions we’re also now aware of the Samson Option — a deterrent whereby the Israeli government would respond to any attacks by using their stockpile to wipe out not only their enemies but also Europe, Asia and the rest of the world. You better believe that includes us.

1Obama Prosecutes Edward Snowden

A week or so ago, the biggest story of the past few years blew up without warning. The Washington Post and the Guardian received documented confirmation that the NSA was unconstitutionally monitoring and storing communications data. They had done this without asking the electorate, without telling anyone they were doing so and without even informing members of Congress about the full extent of their intrusion.

Essentially, they shredded the Constitution to set up a spying agency even China would envy — and they did so to constantly monitor whoever they want to. The source of this information? Edward Snowden — a former CIA contractor the Department of Justice is now preparing to prosecute.

Let’s be clear here: Snowden has done us a favor. No one in their right mind wants the government snooping into their private lives 24/7. Currently, there’s no evidence that this intrusion saved a single life, let alone halted any terror attacks – despite what the administration claims. When exposing these files, Snowden took care not to publish anything that might harm the US, its agents or its international operations. In other words: he’s less a troublemaker than some guy who just saw the cesspit of corruption our leaders were festering in and thought ‘enough’. He did so at the cost of his job, his family and likely his freedom — and our government responds by calling him a ‘traitor’. If that’s not prima facie evidence that our system is screwed, what is?

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Whether it’s for the sake of development, spite, or just plain stupidity, unfortunately sometimes important historical sites get demolished. Here is a list of some of the worst offenders.

10Everything Destroyed by MoMA

One would think that if anyone would be against destroying important pieces of culture and history, it would be a museum. When it comes to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, however, that’s completely wrong. Over the years, the MoMA has acquired and destroyed several historically significant sites in order to make room for expansion, and just recently added another to that list when it purchased the American Folk Art Museum and promptly announced plans to demolish it.

One of the other buildings the people at the MoMA have destroyed is an old brownstone home, which would likely be just another in a long line of traditional Brownstones in the area but for the fact that it once belonged to John D. Rockefeller himself. Of course there is a catch to that one, as the MoMA was co-founded by Rockefeller’s wife, and the family donated the home to the museum, which then tore down the house and turned it into a garden. However, several of the other houses were not donated and were at the center of an effort to preserve what remained of the neighborhood. It was an effort that ultimately failed, with many of the historic homes being razed, along with buildings like the Dorset Hotel and the City Athletic Club.

9Civil Rights Site

Now here is an entry that would almost be funny if it weren’t so incredibly sad. George Elmore, owner of a small South Carolina store, had the audacity to put his name on a lawsuit calling for the end to all white primaries in the state. His participation in the lawsuit cost him his business and put him on the path toward financial ruin. For his part, however, he has been remembered as a civil rights pioneer and a historic marker was placed in front of his old storefront at a 2012 ceremony attended by city leaders and church members, praising Elmore for his bravery.

And then a week later the store was bulldozed, leaving that historic marker standing in front of a pile of rubble. Did we mention that church members were present at the ceremony honoring Elmore? Well this is the part where we tell you that it was the First Nazareth Baptist Church, which sat right next door, that had the building demolished despite the pleas of Elmore’s son. Did we mention that Elmore won that lawsuit back in 1947? That’s right, the people who tore down his store were the same people he helped achieve equality 65 years earlier.

8William Shakespeare’s Home

Let’s take our time machine back to jolly old 18th-century England — or rather, to not-so-jolly old England, and the final home of the one and only William Shakespeare. The home, in the small town of Stratford-upon-Avon, was where Shakespeare is said to have written some of his later works, including The Tempest, and the site of his death in 1616. Fast forward to 1753 when a man named Reverend Francis Gastrell purchased the home. Six years later, he had it demolished.

Why would he have the home completely destroyed, you ask? Well, it boils down to bitterness and irritation. As is the case with famous homes, it turned out to be a pretty popular spot for tourists. People, after all, were curious to see Shakespeare’s house. Think of it as the 18th-century version of a Hollywood Star Homes Tour. Gastrell quickly got fed up with people constantly walking by and looking at his home that he decided to just tear the whole thing down. It was a move that, as you might guess, did not exactly endear him to the townsfolk, and he eventually moved out of town to escape the people’s anger.

7Ancient Chinese Grave Sites

Despite what Lara Croft may lead you to believe, tomb raiding is not cool. In fact, it is very much the opposite of cool, in that, while the likes of Lara Croft and even Indiana Jones may accidentally muck up some history while trying to preserve it, real-life tomb raiders do nothing but destroy history. Of course these grave robbers think only of financial gain, which is exactly why it has become a huge problem in China, with tomb raiders using dynamite and even bulldozers to blunder their way into ancient grave sites.

These thieves break into tombs and steal whatever looks valuable, selling the priceless valuables within days on the black market. Sadly, this means huge parts of history are being lost, and these ancient and historic burial grounds are being desecrated in the process. To put into perspective just how bad this problem has gotten, a team of archaeologists investigated 900 tombs, only to find that each and every one had been raided. Unfortunately for China, it’s not just thieves doing their best to destroy ancient culture, as you’ll see in our next entry …

6Ancient Taoist Temple in Beijing

When Beijing hosted the Olympics in 2008, a lot of work needed to be done to prepare the city for the enormous event. That included building new, state-of-the-art stadiums and event centers, and in a city like Beijing, the land for such huge structures is difficult to come by. That’s why the government gave no second thought to demolishing countless pieces of Chinese history, including a 680-year-old Taoist temple that had been named one of the most significant cultural sites in the entire country.

Historic homes and statues were bulldozed in order to make way for shopping malls and skyscrapers, with the government winding up spending more than $22 billion — yes, that’s “billion”, with a “b” — to almost completely redo the city for this one event. Despite the fact that the Olympics have the capability to generate an enormous amount of revenue for the host country, that is still an insane amount of money spent to renovate one of the world’s most historic cities, and the real cost, as it turns out, was the loss of a huge part of Chinese culture.

5…And Most of China, Really

And unfortunately, as it turns out, there’s a staggering lack of care for preserving Chinese history within the country. Thanks to the continued land development throughout the country, a survey revealed that approximately 31,000 historical sites have been completely destroyed. This report comes from the State Administration for Cultural Heritage, from data collected over the past three decades.

Among some of the sites destroyed either in part or entirely, according to some reports, is a portion of the Great Wall of China. Illegal mining along the wall has led to the partial destruction of some segments. This all came about when the folks at the SACH set about trying to examine the hundreds of thousands of historical sites they had listed throughout the country, only to learn that tens of thousands had completely vanished thanks to the aggressive urbanization of the country. In one of the more ironic twists, included in the historic sites that has since been destroyed was the home of legendary architect I.M. Pei, which was demolished to make way for more modern architecture. Sadly, it’s probably a McDonald’s or something equally depressing at this point.

4Buddha Statues

In the Hindu Kush Mountains in Afghanistan, there once stood 1,700-year-old Buddha statues of tremendous historical and cultural significance. We say “once stood” because back in 2001, the Taliban decided that all non-Islamic statues should be destroyed, including those ancient Bamiyan Buddha statues. The United Nations begged the Taliban to spare these statues, but shockingly found it impossible to reason with a group of extremists.

And so the Taliban drilled holes into the Buddha statues, filled them with dynamite, and proceeded to blow them up and reduce them to rubble. The edict issued by the Taliban that all statues be destroyed did not allow for any to be removed and transported to another country, meaning every bit of non-Islam heritage fell as the Taliban attempted to wipe all pieces of evidence of other religions from Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, the wanton destruction of all of these statues, particularly the Bamiyan Buddha statues, did little to endear the Taliban to the rest of the world.

3A Mayan Pyramid

Imagine the embarrassment of a work crew when they’ve been tearing away at a big stone structure in order to create gravel to repair the roads, only to learn that you’ve just accidentally demolished a 2,300-year-old Mayan pyramid. Oops. Sadly, that’s exactly what happened just a month ago in Belize when a construction company tore down the pyramid, which was actually part of the protected Noh Mul ceremonial center.

According to experts, the construction company absolutely should have known it was in fact a Mayan pyramid, and the fact that the company has denied knowledge is almost laughable. To make matters worse, the maximum penalty is a $10,000 fine, which could never come remotely close to covering the damage since Mayan pyramids are pretty much, you know, priceless. Considering remnants of the lost Mayan civilization are relatively scarce, the fact that a piece of that ancient history was destroyed simply to fill in a few pot holes seems unfathomably stupid.

2The Berlin Wall

Before you say anything, yes, we realize that the Berlin Wall was partially destroyed as a result of the end of the Cold War. We remember Reagan’s famous words, too. That’s not the part we are talking about, however, because part of the wall remains and has become a cultural icon in the two decades following that historic event. Of course, now the rest of the wall will be torn down to make room for luxury apartments, a move that has angered many and led to thousands of Berliners protesting the decision.

Now, whether you think the wall should stay or go is irrelevant, despite the fact that it is a symbol of communist oppression. At this point, it has indeed truly become a symbol and a place of historical significance. Heck, even David Hasselhoff flew to Germany to join in the protests. Unfortunately, the Hoff’s German-sounding name wasn’t German enough, because the developers have decided to move right on ahead with the demolition anyway.

1Mecca

Mecca, for those who are unaware, is the holiest site in all of Islam. The city was the birthplace of the prophet Muhammad, the founder of the religion, and it is the place where Muhammad said that all Muslims would be equal. And now, today, it is slowly being transformed into the Middle Eastern version of Las Vegas. The holy city has become a victim of swift and progressive urbanization and capitalism, with its culture being paved away in favor of shopping centers, skyscrapers, and luxury hotels. Perhaps the saddest part is that much of the demolition has been ordered by the city’s actual Wahabi clerics, who believe that keeping the shrines equates to the sin of idolatry.

To a degree, the city has begun to look less like the holy land it once was and more like another Dubai. It has been argued that the city was in desperate need of at least some renovation and an improved infrastructure due to the massive number of pilgrims who make their way to Mecca each year, but the extent to which it has been changed and its culture buried has angered many historians and members of Islam, though few have spoken out for fear of losing access to the city and its remaining historical sites. One particularly egregious example is the fact that Muhammad’s first wife’s home has been demolished and turned into a public toilet. The symbolism in that alone speaks volumes about the current views these developers have on the city’s heritage.

The post 10 Historically Significant Sites Destroyed For Awful Reasons appeared first on Listverse.

This is perhaps the main reason why rock ‘n’ roll has always been a minefield of myths and urban legends. In this list we will discover the real stories behind some of rock’s craziest rumors, how they became cult and why many of them have persisted to this day.

10White Stripes a big happy family?

Myth: Jack White and Meg White are brother and sister.

Fact: This one was actually started by Jack White, who originally claimed that he and Meg White were siblings during the early days of The White Stripes. The reality is that Jack White and Meg White are not related at all.

They were married for a while, but divorced many years and albums ago. Jack, born Jack Gillis, took Meg’s last name during the marriage and decided to keep it following their split. So next time you hear Meg telling an interviewer, “I love Jack White like a little brother,” don’t fall for it. At this point they just love playing with the media and fans.

9Music group 311 and their “racist” passwords

Myth: 311’s name stands for the KKK because “K” is the eleventh letter of the alphabet.

Fact: This rumor has followed the band since the ’90s. It’s not completely out of the ordinary for hate groups to use numerology or initials as code — 88 is a popular number in the Neo-Nazi community, standing for HH, or “Heil Hitler.” But that’s not the case for 311. The band is not related to hate or racism at all and 311 is generally known as an alternative rock band.

The band’s name originates from the police code for indecent exposure in Omaha, Nebraska, after the original guitarist for the band was arrested for streaking. The vocalist and guitarist of the group, Nick Hexum, has of course denied any connection with this rumor of hidden racism, which he finds ridiculous and unworthy of discussion.

8Is Gene Simmons part animal

Myth: KISS vocalist and bassist Gene Simmons, famous for wagging his tongue as part of his onstage antics, had a cow’s tongue surgically attached to his own.

Fact: Rumors said that Simmons had a cow’s tongue surgically attached onto his own tongue to help him create the character of the “Demon” that he portrayed onstage. Teenagers from the 1970′s were convinced that no human could have a tongue that long without surgical enhancement and, while Simmons does have indeed an abnormally long tongue, there is no truth at all to this myth.

The fact is that ’70s medical technology didn’t extend to successfully attaching animal parts to humans, and a cow’s tongue looks nothing like Simmons’ or any other human’s. This is just another rock ‘n’ roll myth birthed from the effects of drugs and alcohol.

7Lady Gaga: Male or Female?

Myth: Lady Gaga is a hermaphrodite.

Fact: Every famous person has, at some point, been the subject of rumors and outright hoaxes. The more mysterious their personal life is to the public, the wilder the rumors. When Lady Gaga burst onto the music scene with “Just Dance” in 2008, her unique style and fascinating persona made her the source of a number of urban legends. One of them suggested that Lady Gaga was born a hermaphrodite or even worse a man.

This rumor is actually an adaptation of a much older tale. The young Jamie Lee Curtis was the subject of widespread speculation that she had been born intersex. It was suggested that her androgynous name was to allow her to choose a gender herself. After a photograph of Lady Gaga seemed to reveal a possible bulge, the rumor switched to the pop sensation.

Her love of gay culture and outrageous public persona add more fuel to the fire. Despite false reports of her issuing a statement confirming she was intersex, the truth emerged. Lady Gaga demonstrated definitively to the press that she was born female. However, the rumor persists to this day.

6Michael Jackson didn’t have many plastic surgeries

Myth: Michael Jackson had only two plastic surgeries during his lifetime.

Fact: The funniest (or saddest) part of this myth is that the dedicated fans of Jackson believe this. Actually they believed anything their idol said. Michael Jackson told Oprah in 1992, and Martin Bashir in 2003, that he only had two plastic surgeries on his nose and a constructive plastic surgery on his scalp after he got burned. Michael may have told a few fibs in his day, but it feels like he underestimated our intelligence a little too much with this one.

If you pay attention to Michael’s nose during his debut album Off the Wall and then check on it again in the Thriller album and so on until his 2001 studio album, Invincible, you will notice that he had a different nose for every single album, which means that he probably kept having surgeries. Also add in the mix his obviously different cheekbones, chin, eyebrows, lips and eye shape and you easily find out that Michael probably forgot to add a zero after the “two” he claimed to have had.

5Marilyn Manson likes “extreme” sports

Myth: Marilyn Manson removed a pair of ribs to be able to perform self-fellatio.

Fact: It might be true that when you mention Marilyn Manson, most people think of the disgusting (yet so legendary!) fictional surgery Manson supposedly underwent to have the lower half of his ribs removed so he can give himself auto-fellatio.

Of course all this is nothing more than a dirty rumor, a myth that some filthy haters of the rocker started. In Marilyn’s defense, the man had a really sexy wife during the time these rumors arose and he didn’t really need to practice such nasty and abnormal habits. And according to most plastic surgeons, removing your lower ribs does not allow you to do that type of act: it only helps you to make your waist appear thinner. Manson vs Myth = 1-0.

4The real Paul McCartney has been dead for years

Myth: McCartney died in an auto accident in 1966 and was replaced by an impersonator.

Fact: The McCartney myth started with (apparently) legitimate wire service reports being fed to radio stations. It all began on October 12, 1969, when Russ Gibb, a DJ for Detroit’s underground station WKNR-FM, received a phone call by a man named “Tom,” who claimed that some Beatles records contained hidden clues suggesting that Paul McCartney had actually died. The fact that it took McCartney a while to deny the rumor added even more fuel to it.

The rumors became so noisy that Paul McCartney himself had to reassure his fans that he was still alive. In an exclusive 1969 interview with Life magazine he stated, paraphrasing Mark Twain, “Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. However, if I was dead, I’m sure I’d be the last to know.” He also offered a number of explanations for the mysterious clues. Thank God, Paul never left us.

3Elvis Presley was a racist

Myth: Elvis stated that “The only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes.”

Fact: According to some people, this one sentence that was never verified or witnessed by any credible or existing person, confirms the belief that Elvis was a cynical racist who “stole” everything he knew from the black man. There’s no doubt (and Elvis never denied) that he was heavily influenced by black music and black musicians, but was he a racist? There’s no evidence proving such a thing. If anything, all the evidence points to Elvis’ love for black music.

Of course this ridiculous urban legend should be nothing but comedy material nowadays: If Elvis was racist for being influenced by other artists, then every artist is a thieving racist. Elvis was envied by some for good reason: He did what he did really well and he had the looks and charisma to go with it, something that most other musicians of that era lacked. Elvis was the one who influenced almost every artist of his generation and black (and white) artists copied his style and attitude.

And, as the great Little Richard said, “Elvis was an integrator. Elvis was a blessing. They wouldn’t let black music through. Elvis didn’t steal but he opened the door for black music.”

2Jim Morrison is still alive

Myth: Jim Morrison is alive and someone else’s body is in his grave.

Fact: In spite of extensive and largely irrefutable evidence to the contrary, there are still those who believe that Jim Morrison is alive and is periodically spotted in convenience stores, restaurants and trailer parks all over the world.

Some won’t even believe that Morrison’s body is the one buried in his grave in a Paris cemetery. The official cause of Morrison’s death was listed as a heart attack — believed by many to have been drug related — in 1971.

One conspiracy theorist has even produced a video and he claims that Morrison lives the life of a cowboy in the Pacific Northwest. People who have seen the video say the man in it, bears no resemblance to Morrison and, other than the fact that many of his song lyrics had mystical themes, there is no evidence to suggest that his death was faked. Truth is, there are a few unanswered questions and many coincidences regarding his sudden death, that don’t make much sense. However, the legend that is Jim Morrison will live on forever. Some things are just too good to be forgotten.

1Courtney Love is behind Kurt’s death

Myth: Courtney Love murdered Kurt Cobain.

Fact: No matter how the strongly the hardcore fans disagree, the sad reality is that Kurt probably killed himself. He struggled his entire life with bipolar disorder and drug addiction and he tried to kill himself several times before.

There are many unanswered questions regarding his death, however, that feed the minds of the people who invent such theories and conspiracies. California private investigator Tom Grant maintains that Kurt’s body tested for three times a lethal amount of heroin, suggesting a self-inflected gunshot wound would be impossible. Grant also believes Courtney Love was involved in the murder of Kurt Cobain, yet there is no evidence to support his claim.

Also recent accusations of Courtney’s and Kurt’s daughter that her mother is an unstable mother figure who killed her pets, constantly pops pills and starts fires by smoking in bed, only served to rekindle all the rumors about Courtney murdering Kurt.

The post 10 Wild Rock ‘n’ Roll Urban Legends People Believe appeared first on Listverse.

9Fishing Cormorants

Just as wolves became assistants in the hunt rather than a threat to early humans, Asian & Mediterranean fishermen have long recruited ocean cormorants as rather unorthodox hunting assistants. In a bizarre aquatic version of falconry, these relatives of the pelican with a serpentine neck and razor-sharp bill are taught to capture and return fish for a reward.

After being hand-tamed at an early age, the seabirds are fitted with a collar that prevents the cormorant from swallowing the fish. After catching a certain number of fish, the master removes the ring and gives his cormorant a portion of the catch as “payment”. As cormorants are not waterproof, they must dry their feathers daily.

8Navy Seals

The term “Navy Seals” may be expanded to include not only human dive specialists, but our favorite small marine mammals. As literal “trained seals”, California sea lions have been trained to seek out mines and even pursue enemy divers underwater. These “undersea police dogs” stand guard on high-security piers, and are armed with a special clamp, which they use to handcuff enemy divers or saboteurs.

Twenty-eight sea lions are currently employed as sentries, one as a naval base guard in Washington State. Once the 700-pound, 2.1-meter (7-ft) carnivores catch up with a target and handcuff them, a human assistant may reel up the diver from the dock, although the shock factor of being arrested by an animal would probably be enough.

7Wolf Eagles

Falconry is a sport long practiced by royalty and warriors across the Old World and, more recently, by dedicated hobbyist hunters. Most hunters train their birds to target small game, but steppe hunters of Mongolia take human/raptor partnerships to an entirely new level of ferocity. Using trained golden eagles, an immensely powerful, 3-meter (9-foot) wingspan raptor widely considered “The King of Birds”, Mongolian herdsmen send these feathered fighter pilots into combat against wolves.

The eagles swoop in at over 80 kph (50 mph), and kill the unfortunate canines with a combination of impact force and talon strength. Many conservationists object to this practice, but traditional hunts may be less harmful. Eagles may also simply hold the wolves, allowing human hunters to deliver the coup de grace.

6Electric Eel Power

Many of the creatures on this list have established themselves in historical instances. However, humans are finding ever more novel uses for animals as our technological knowledge expands. The electric eel from Brazil’s Amazon River is actually a member of the knifefish family and often grows up to six feet in length. The fish releases steady pulses of electricity and may give off bursts of over 500 volts when alarmed.

While past Listverse pieces have described the dangers of electrocution posed by these hunters, humans have learned to harness this force. In Japan, novelty tanks have been established that route electricity from the eel to power Christmas tree lights in a very unusual form of “hydropower”.

5Seeing-Eye Horse

Seeing-eye dogs have long been established as service animals for the visually impaired, but not everyone likes dogs. Miniature horses offer many advantages over dogs as visual service animals and are becoming increasingly popular in the visually impaired community. Measuring as short as 0.5 meters (18 in) at the shoulder, the tiny equines have superior vision to dogs and are less likely to be distracted.

As training a new guide dog may cost up to $60,000, a horse is more cost effective as it can live up to 50 years. The horses are fully house-trainable and possess superior memory compared to the traditional guide dog, allowing them to map out safe walking routes. And, of course, everyone likes ponies.

4Snake Massage Therapy

Snakes may induce fear, distress or revulsion for some, but an alternative perspective led one entrepreneur to set up shop as a reptile massage therapist. Snake massage therapy takes advantage of the relaxing, cool and gentle slithering and squeezing effect of the animals, which do not bite.

Contrary to popular belief, snakes are not in any way slimy, but possess smooth scales, and may rapidly become comfortable with humans. Those looking for a more serious form of assistance have turned to snakes to provide warnings of oncoming seizures. As the sensory abilities of snakes and their diverse skills are better understood, their resume may yet become as long as their bodies.

3Hero Rats

When we think of life-saving animals capable of detecting explosives, stopping criminals and rescuing humans from perilous situations, we usually imagine dogs. Conversely, when we think of animal threats to human comfort and safety, we may think of rats. But humans can even improve rats. Growing up to 1 meter (3 ft) long, the African pouched rat is a giant among rodents that is not only dog-sized, but shares comparable intelligence and trainability.

Capable of being rapidly bred and leash-trained, the magnificent murids are being used by African non-profits to detect and clear landmines in former war zones. Many human lives may be saved by these giant rodents, and successful operations have motivated American researchers to begin studies to expand the HeroRAT program in mine zones worldwide.

2Guard Donkey

When you have a property to protect from intruders, a Rottweiler, Cane Corso or Doberman Pinscher looking like an outtake from a Jack Lemmon film might seem to fit the bill. However, you always have the option of taking the alternative approach and recruiting a guard donkey instead of a guard dog. Guard donkeys can be trained to direct their herd-defending instincts against threats to the property with surprisingly effective results and are becoming recognized as a viable option to property protection and livestock security.

These “kick-ass” domestic defenders will fearlessly charge human and animal intruders before confronting them with carnivore-like snarls, bared incisor teeth and ready hooves. Stomping attacks will prevent future run-ins with livestock predators.

1Call Duck

Few creatures are as despised by society as the traitor. That is, unless the traitor is working in our favor. Rather than working solely with dogs or falcons as hunting companions, humans have developed a breed of mallard duck to betray its wild brethren and assist man in hunting.

The tame call duck is released in a marsh, where it quacks repeatedly with an extra loud voice. Wild ducks are drawn in by the siren-like bird, only to be shot by the hunters once they fly within range or land on the water. Once the hunter has shot the waterfowl, the call ducks return to their master, and dogs retrieve the quarry.

Alexandre Thompson is an extreme wildlife researcher and writer with a passion for the mysterious and bizarre elements of the animal world. He is an MSc candidate in Environmental Sciences at Royal Roads University. Email Alexandre for nature writing services and tours in Canada.

The post 9 Truly Bizarre Ways Animals Work for Humans appeared first on Listverse.

10 Pain

Pain is a tricky concept to quantify. We all know people who can deal with a limb being lopped off without complaint while we ourselves are weeping over a paper cut. One potential way to work out a scale of pain would be for an individual to experience a range of painful stimuli and compare them against each other. This was the course Justin Schmidt took when he wished to compare the pain caused by various invertebrate stings. Schmidt ranks the pain caused by a sting from 0 (Ineffective against humans) to 4 (Excruciating). For stings at the higher end of the scale he also adds a verbal description of the pain to allow a fuller examination of what one suffers. One sting—that of the Pepsis wasp—was described as “Immediate, excruciating pain that simply shuts down one’s ability to do anything, except, perhaps, scream.”

9 Cholera

Max von Pettenkofer was a huge figure in 19th century German medicine, being seen as the founder of hygiene. One of the most troubling diseases at the time was cholera, which causes death by extreme loss of fluids by diarrhea. We now know that it is caused by a germ, Vibrio cholerae, and is spread by fecal contamination. Pettenkofer lived in the early days of the germ theory of disease and was convinced cholera was caused by a mixture of a germ and soil conditions which transformed the germ into an infectious miasma. To prove the importance of soil in developing cholera, Pettenkofer drank a sample of pure cholera germs to see if he would get sick. While he felt a little unwell he did not end up dying from voluminous vomiting and diarrhea. This shows the limit of self-experimentation; we only have one self and a single datum is not generally sufficient to prove a theory.

8 Food

Since the first person starved to death it has been obvious that humans need food. What is less obvious is what happens to it once it is inside you and why it seems we excrete less than we take in. In the early 17th century a doctor called Sanctorius decided to weigh everything he ate, his own body, and everything he excreted for over 30 years. He built a special chair to allow him to measure the changes in his weight. These experiments allowed him to calculate that for every 8 pounds of food he ate he passed only 3 pounds of waste. Clearly some was being lost by a process he could not understand and he called this an insensible perspiration. Weighing all your feces and urine for 30 years is true dedication to science, but then I suppose it is better to use your own than someone else’s.

7 Infectiousness

Yellow fever is a viral disease spread by mosquitoes that still kills 30,000 people each year despite there being an effective vaccine available. In the past epidemics of yellow fever would spread through North America and people would regularly leave cities for the safer countryside during ‘the fever season.’ Since it was such a peril a young medical student called Stubbins Ffirth decided to investigate. Certain that it was impossible for the disease to pass from one person to another he tried to infect someone using samples from victims. The person he tried to infect, as you might guess from this list, was himself. He took vomit from yellow fever patients and drank it. He also rubbed it in cuts on his own body for good measure. He did not contract the disease. Perhaps that was not the infectious route, he considered; so he then poured vomit onto his eyeballs. Still no fever. He then progressed through blood, saliva, and pus. Still in robust health Ffirth decided he had confirmed yellow fever was not infectious and published his results. Unfortunately all his samples had come from patients who had passed the infectious stage of the illness and yellow fever is very much a transmissible illness. He never found out he had drunk vomit for nothing.

6 Electrical Stimulation

The discovery of electricity and its effects on dead animals lead to a scramble of scientists attempting to investigate the role of electricity in life. Johann Wilhelm Ritter, discoverer of ultraviolet light, was one such scientist. His experiments into ‘animal electricity’ did away with testing it on corpses and onto his own body. He applied charges to various areas and recorded the results. The most extreme reaction he found was when he used his battery, a Voltaic pile, on his genitals and achieved orgasm. Like a child with a new toy he repeated his experiments endlessly. He was so attached to his work that he joked about marrying his Voltaic pile. The increasing shocks he gave himself occasionally required morphine to dull the pain and it is likely he shortened his life by his work.

5 Surviving Submarines

War has been a natural training ground for scientists. The huge number of bodies produced let early medics explore human anatomy. But the urge to help prevent deaths has also spurred some scientists into risky behaviors. J. B. S. Haldane was one of the great theorists of evolution but also had a flair for dramatic experiments. He learned this from his father, also a biologist, who used to experiment on his son. Wishing to study the effects of rapid changes in pressure which a submariner would experience on escaping from a wreck, Haldane had himself repeatedly placed in a decompression chamber. While much was learned about nitrogen narcosis, the bends, no major harm was done to Haldane except for some fits and perforated ear drums. He shrugged this latter off. “The drum generally heals up; and if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment.”

4 Upside Down World

All we know of the world is through our senses and so it is natural for scientists to investigate how those senses work. George Stratton decided to test how the mind would adapt to change in its perception of sight. By wearing glasses he inverted his vision so up was down and down was up. At first putting on the glasses led to the nausea and disconnected feelings you would expect. Within days he was able to function normally and after some time he reported that he actually felt the image he was receiving was actually the right way up. When he took the glasses off he thought the world as he saw it without the glasses was upside down. Repetitions of this experiment have failed to replicate this feeling normality but have shown the power of the brain to adapt to changes in perception compared to reality.

3 Hanging Sensation

Nicolae Minovici was a man who had a question he wanted an answer to: what does hanging feel like? For most of us the answer ‘Probably not great’ would be a sufficient guess, but Minovici wanted to know beyond reasonable doubt. The only logical answer was therefore to have himself hanged and experience it for himself. Several times and with several different types of noose he had assistants hoist him into the air. The pain was apparently severe and lasted for weeks after each experiment, not something condemned men would have to contend with as their suffering is cut somewhat short. Of course this experiment does not answer what those who suffer the long drop and a broken neck undergo when they are executed.

2 Heart Cathetar

Sometimes it is necessary for doctors to get access to the heart either for diagnosis or treatment. The simplest way to do this might seem to be to hack open the chest and have a look at the organ itself. Obviously this has massive risks and while even today opening the chest is risky, in the 1930s it would have been almost certainly fatal. Werner Forssman studied corpses and decided it would be possible to pass a thin tube, or catheter, along blood vessels and directly into the heart. Needing to discover whether this would be possible in still living humans he decided an experiment would be in order. He cut open his arm and threaded the tube up and into his heart. A small slip could have torn a major vessel and led to his death but he still needed to prove he had reached the heart. So, with the tube dangling from his arm, he walked from the operating room to an x-ray machine, and took the pictures which showed he had been successful. For this bit of scientific derring-do he shared the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1956.

1 Stomach Ulcers

One of the most basic rules of lab safety is no eating or drinking, but there can be serious rewards for ignoring this ban. Today stomach ulcers are, for the most part, just punch lines in jokes about people being too stressed but they were once a major cause of death. The risk is from an ulcer causing bleeding or perforating and leading to infection. The cause of these potentially fatal ulcers was a mystery until two scientists, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, discovered many patients carried the bacterium Helicobacter pylori in their stomachs. After checking his stomach was healthy Marshall downed a Petri dish of the bacteria and waited. He soon developed gastritis and other symptoms. They had shown H. pylori could cause stomach ulcers and that antibiotics could treat them. For this discovery Marshall and Warren shared a Nobel Prize in 2005.

The post 10 Extreme Cases Of Self-Experimentation appeared first on Listverse.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 were one of the most videotaped events in history. The majority of the footage comes from lower Manhattan in New York City. There was so much video captured that the Internet Archive has enough coverage to virtually replay the day. The material is extremely graphic, violent, and heart-wrenching. It shows the pain experienced in New York and the complete destruction of three high-rise structures.

For those of you who were not old enough to understand 9/11 in 2001, you can now get a sense of the day by examining the footage. This article is going to examine ten raw clips captured on 9/11, all from New York City. The videos are not edited and contain bad language, so discretion is advised.

One of the most common conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 is that the WTC buildings were destroyed by a controlled demolition. In 2006, a group named the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth movement was formed with the goal of getting the U.S. Congress to perform an independent investigation into the September 11 attacks. The group has submitted a petition with the signatures of over 1,600 professional architects, engineers, and demolition specialists who feel the evidence shows that the towers were destroyed by controlled demolition.

The current explanation is that WTC 1, WTC 2, and 7 WTC were brought down by the impact of two large airplanes, which caused the inward bowing of vital building columns. The impact of the aircraft also created large fires that buckled the buildings core. The description is plausible, but it immediately drew criticism from engineers around the world who concluded the evidence shows the buildings were demolished by explosives. Some anomalies include the “free fall acceleration of the structures, the durlateral ejection of steel, and the mid-air pulverization of concrete.”

It has been suggested that the lack of “large gradual deformations” associated with the collapse shows the buildings were brought down by controlled demolition. It has also been pointed out that the buildings fell through the “path of greatest resistance” which requires the removal of critical columns. AE911 has examined the debris from Ground Zero and discovered signs of molten iron, thermite, and unignited nano-thermite, which is evidence for highly explosive materials.

In the videos captured on 9/11, very few (if any) bombs are heard or witnessed by the camera. The best evidence for the presence of bombs on 9/11 includes a series of video interviews taken on the day of the attack. In the footage, many people can be seen describing the sound of large explosions and falling debris in the WTC. One such case is a famous clip that shows two firefighters describing three large explosions that occurred in the lobby of one of the buildings. The men are clearly distraught and the video shows the horror felt by the FDNY as they attempted to save lives on 9/11.

The Expedition 3 mission to the International Space Station was launched on August 10, 2001. It was the third expedition to the ISS and included American astronaut Frank Culbertson and Russians Mikhail Tyurin and Vladimir Dezhurov. The three men are recognized as being the only people that were not on Earth during the September 11 terrorist attacks. As the International Space Station moved over the New York City area, Culbertson captured pictures and video of lower Manhattan. The video is quite revealing and shows just how large the destruction was. It gives a good sense of exactly where the damage occurred on Earth and how influential the smoke was.

The International Space Station is potentially the most expensive item every constructed. It is the largest artificial body in orbit and can be seen from Earth with the naked eye. The station provides some of the most detailed landscape portraits of Earth and gives an amazing view. On 9/11 as Frank Culbertson was filming the damage, he gave America some assurance saying that “the city still looks very beautiful from space.” It is the only time in history that a disaster on the scale of 9/11 was filmed from space.

In the years since 9/11, a collection of first responders have experienced a wide range of respiratory problems due to the dust at Ground Zero. The first NYPD officer whose death was attributed to the toxic chemicals was James Zadroga, who passed away from respiratory illness in 2006. In the months following 9/11, Zadroga began to experience a persistent cough and extreme shortness of breath. The exact cause of his death is under dispute. However, his autopsy says he had “unidentified foreign materials” in his lungs. On January 2, 2011, President Obama signed the James Zadroga Act which allocated $4.2 billion to create the World Trade Center Health Program.

This video shows the South Tower being hit by Flight 175. It is not the best footage of the event, but is said to include an anomaly that is not witnessed in other clips. Since 9/11, there have been thousands of videos posted on the Internet with claims of strange objects around the towers. Some have pointed to orbs, bizarre helicopters, unexplained shadows, or weird lights. In this clip, a large black spot can be seen flying toward the ground at a high speed right after the plane hits the tower. You can also see a large piece of debris flying out of the North Tower. The footage is one example of the countless videos that are said to show strange activity on 9/11. View another one here.

The majority of the videos on this list show footage taken in the vicinity of the WTC. However, there are approximately 69,464 residents per square mile (26,924/km²) in New York County (Manhattan) and everyone was impacted by 9/11. After the North Tower was struck, thousands of people grabbed their video cameras and took to the streets. For this reason, an enormous amount of video footage was captured. Many of the videos have since been released to the public. However, people all over New York still have footage taken on 9/11 that has never been uploaded to the Internet or submitted to the authorities.

A couple years back a video surfaced that shows the reaction of a collection of New Yorkers who lived a short distance from the WTC. The footage was taken by a man named Chris Ryan and his brother Sean. It starts with Chris reacting to the initial attack on New York. He then travels to his house and watches the disaster from the rooftop of his apartment building with some friends. During the recording, it is revealed that one of the men on the roof worked on the 83rd floor of South Tower, which was completely destroyed by Flight 175.

The video then follows Chris as he rides his bike through the streets of New York towards the WTC. It becomes clear that the citizens of Manhattan are panicked and concerned about the possibility of another attack. It is revealed that the borough of Manhattan has been completely shut down after the second plane struck the South Tower. Toward the end of the footage, Chris captures a collection of people going about their daily activities, which is bothersome to Ryan, as he feels the city might be in further danger.

After the WTC towers collapsed it was reported that 20 people were pulled out alive from the rubble. Some of the most famous cases include police officers John McLoughlin and William Jimeno, who were on the main concourse between the two towers when the South Tower collapsed. They were saved after entering a freight elevator, but almost died from their injuries. Another incredible story is that of Genelle Guzman, who survived a fall from the 13th story of the South Tower. She was knocked unconscious during the initial crash and woke up alive in the rubble. Guzman was the last person found alive. She was discovered by a German Shepherd named Trakr 26 hours after the collapse.

This video shows the initial response to 9/11 after the towers had been struck by the aircraft. The impact caused significant damage to the streets below the buildings, which can be seen in the footage. You can also see people hanging off the towers. In one case, the tape captures a man falling to the ground. The footage is horrifying, but shows a common event that occurred on 9/11.

The video also shows a minor explosion in the tower which causes a large object to shoot out from the building. The cameraman responds by saying “did you see that blowout.” This section of the video has been reposted many times under the title of WTC exploding man, with the suggestion that the clip shows a man being blown from the tower. The video finishes with some shots of firefighters entering the buildings. Sadly, many of these workers were killed in the terrorist attacks.

One of the most popular documentaries made about September 11 is named 9/11. The movie was directed by Jules and Gedeon Naudet, and FDNY firefighter James Hanlon. The footage follows Chief Joseph Pfeifer and the 1st Battalion as they responded to the North Tower of the WTC. On the morning of 9/11, the crew was filming in the streets of New York when Airlines Flight 11 flew overhead and collided with the North Tower. As the plane crashed, Naudet turned his camera and captured the best available video of the plane hitting the tower. Actually, there are only three known clips of Flight 11 hitting the North Tower. You can view Naudet’s footage here.

After the WTC was attacked, the film crew followed the first responders into the North Tower and recorded the scene. The video is chilling and shows the reaction of the workers as the South Tower is struck by the second aircraft. The footage is some of the most raw taken on 9/11, but is often hard to locate online. For this reason, the provided copy is shaky and a bit blurry.

As the camera enters the lobby of the North Tower, you can hear people screaming and the narrator indicates that he saw people on fire, but didn’t record the individuals. The lobby seems to have sustained damage in the impact and you can see Chief Pfeifer controlling the situation. The camera then captures the aftermath of Flight 175 crashing into the South Tower and debris can be seen dropping to the ground. Firefighters in the North Tower recognize that people are falling from the South Tower into the streets, which was a dangerous situation. The falling people caused Chief Pfeifer to order all the firefighters to stay in the lobby.

The next part of the video shows a loud explosion followed by the collapse of a section of the lobby. The entire picture goes black and the firefighters are forced to attempt to escape the rubble. People are killed in the collapse and Chief Pfeifer can be seen ordering the evacuation of the building, which saved many lives. The footage is intense and has been used by some to show evidence for explosives in the basement of the WTC (as you can tell by the name of the video). However, others feel the destruction was caused by falling debris, sonic booms, or Flight 11.

One of the largest conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 is the sudden collapse of the 7 WTC, which was a 47-story building that fell at 5:20 p.m. The building contained the emergency operations center for the city of New York in case of a disaster. In the aftermath of the attack on New York, 7 WTC sustained heavy damage and was evacuated. A collection of New York officials responded to the building as planned, but found it empty. Two of these people were named Barry Jennings and Michael Hess. Sadly, both of these men have since died, but during the last years of their lives, Hess and Jennings proclaimed that they experienced a large explosion while fleeing 7 WTC. The story was supported by a video released by the NIST which shows Hess yelling from the 8th floor of 7 WTC, apparently unable to leave the building. Watch the video here.

Unfortunately, the conspiracy theories surrounding 7 WTC were allowed to spread for seven years before the NIST released a statement on the cause of the disaster. The report indicates that the building experienced a complete failure after several fires buckled critical structural columns and caused the 13th floor to collapse. The collapse triggered a failure of column 79, which caused floors 8 to 14 to give way, followed by the east penthouse and the entire building.

Despite the explanation, many professional engineers feel the claims don’t provide scientific evidence for a complete failure. 7 WTC is the first and only steel framed high rise building to collapse from fire damage. In order to account for the free fall of the structure, the building must have experienced a near-simultaneous buckling of 58 perimeter columns and 25 core columns over eight stories. The scientific model that the NIST used to explain the failure is not available to the public because of U.S. national security concerns. The collapse was also reported twenty minutes early by BBC anchor Jane Standley.

The NIST report considered the possibility that 7 WTC was destroyed by explosives, but concluded that “the use of thermite to sever columns was unlikely.” The investigation was not allowed to use any physical evidence from Ground Zero because the material was lost and could not be positively identified. The report cited evidence that no blasts were heard in videos of the collapse, as well as the fact that no explosions were witnessed. People have responded by posting videos online that are said to include the sound of bombs. The selected clip shows the collapse of 7 WTC, including the clear failure of the east penthouse. This particular clip has gained notoriety because someone has edited out the penthouse collapse in some copies, making for multiple versions.

After the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released the Cumulus Database of 6500 video clips, people were left with a huge collection of information that didn’t have much organization. For this reason, individual clips have emerged over the years that show important details. One of the most famous is a video taken by a man right after the South Tower collapsed. In the footage, the cameraman shows no fear for his life and runs directly into the rubble in order to give the world a glimpse of the horror.

The video starts just after the South Tower gave way. The cameraman moves toward Ground Zero and begins to interview people in an attempt to figure out what happened. He then enters the 7 World Trade Center building, which shows significant signs of damage and blown out windows. The lobby of 7 WTC is destroyed and filled with dust. The footage inside of 7 WTC was used by 9/11 researchers to help calculate how much damage was sustained to the building during the collapse. However, the majority of critical damage sustained to 7 WTC on 9/11 was caused by the failure of the nearby North Tower.

The cameraman then goes directly toward the South Tower to Ground Zero. The footage includes some of the first pictures taken of the damage. The sound of running water and creaking metal can be heard. After a short time, the video captures the tail end of the collapse of the North Tower. People can be seen sprinting from the dust cloud, while the cameraman just stands there in shock. The footage includes some of the most revealing scenes taken on 9/11. It runs for the first 30 minutes of the included 55 minute long video.

At 9:58 EDT on September 11, 2001 the South Tower of the WTC collapsed and created an enormous gray-white cloud of pulverized concrete and gypsum that moved through the streets of New York. After the collapse, people near the towers were unsure of what happened because they couldn’t see the buildings. However, it soon became clear that most everything was gone. Like no other event in history, thousands of people were killed without a trace.

Farther away from ground zero, people with cameras watched in horror as the South Tower tumbled to the ground. The people immediately understood the magnitude of the tragedy, which caused panic and shock. After the tower collapsed, the entire event reached a higher level of uncertainty. Some felt the people of New York were under attack.

On 9/11, the collapse of the South Tower was captured on video by dozens of different people. The footage selected shows a group of individuals watching the collapse from a good distance away. The cameraman is not in danger of getting covered by the concrete cloud, but you can feel the reaction of the crowd as the building falls. Some conspiracy theorists have latched on to the footage claiming it shows evidence for molten iron on the South Tower moments before the collapse. You can watch another chilling video of the collapse here.

One of the most chilling events of 9/11 was when Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower. The force of the plane caused the tower to collapse 56 minutes after impact and the crash was captured by hundreds of video cameras that were focused on the North Tower. The footage clearly shows the plane hitting the tower at a high speed. It was the first time in history that a large number of news anchors reported on such an influential event as it happened on live television. Some proclaimed on TV that the impact provided evidence for a coordinated terrorist attack.

When Flight 175 collided with the South Tower, all 60 people on board the plane were instantly killed. The video shows the aircraft making a sharp left turn before hitting the building. If the turn had not been carried out, the plane would have missed the tower or clipped the building with one wing. During the aircrafts decent, passengers on the left side of the plane had a clear view of the WTC. Some attempted to make cell phone calls, which revealed that both pilots had been killed and a flight attendant had been stabbed. The final moments of Flight 175 are covered in a documentary titled Flight 175: As the World Watched.

A large number of videos of the crash show a close-up view of Flight 175 slamming into the building, while other clips show the impact from a distance. For this article I have focused on a compilation clip that does a great job showing a series of different videos taken of the crash. You can see the plane and explosion from almost every angle. I will also include a video of some men watching the crash in horror from a downtown apartment building. It shows that some people of Middle Eastern heritage were also shocked and disturbed by the violence. You can view the footage here. You can also watch the best available clip of the crash in slow motion here.

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Burger King is no stranger to weird marketing stunts, such as the dreadful 2004 Coq Roq campaign, wherein faux nu metal rockers with chicken masks on thrashed to music filled with double entendre. Their mascot—a towering, creepy King with unmoving features, was mercifully retired in 2011. But perhaps the worst idea in company history was their 2009 Facebook “Whopper Sacrifice” campaign. The premise was simple; use the Burger King application to unfriend 10 people on Facebook, and you would get a coupon for a free Whopper. Normally, there is no notification involved in unfriending someone, but in this instance, Burger King would send the friend a message informing them that their friendship was less important to you than a free sandwich. The campaign was promptly dropped, but not before people leapt at the opportunity, abandoning almost 234,000 friends in the process (that’s more than 23,000 Whoppers).

Taco Bell is perhaps best known for its Chihuahua ad campaign, which was often derided as racist. The ads, starring Gidget, were stopped in 2000. Gidget didn’t remain unemployed for long; she found several other roles, including a spot in “Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, and Blonde”. Taco Bell didn’t fare so well… they’d stolen the Chihuahua idea from two Michigan men, Joseph Shields and Thomas Rinks. The pair pitched the idea to Taco Bell in the 1990s, but were rejected. Shortly thereafter, the restaurant chain’s new ad agency began using the concept. The men took Taco Bell to court, and in 2003, a jury awarded them $30 million. The judge promptly added on $12 million. Shields and Rinks walked away with $42 million for their troubles.

A subsidiary of Yum! Brands (which also owns KFC and Pizza Hut), Taco Bell enjoys considerable popularity worldwide, and has locations selling its Mexican fare in several countries throughout the world. A notable exception: Mexico. They made two attempts to crack the Mexican market, in 1992 and 2007, but both times folded due to lack of patronage.

Wendy’s is best known for its simple commercials starring earnest, plainspoken founder Dave Thomas. Thomas was working as a head cook in a restaurant in Fort Wayne, Indiana, when Kentucky Fried Chicken owner Colonel Harland Sanders came calling, selling franchises. Thomas, as well as the family for he worked for, bought in. In doing so, Dave worked closely with the Colonel on marketing ideas. It was Dave Thomas who suggested the idea of buckets of chicken, which help keep the product crisp. He also suggested Sanders appear in his own commercials.

The response was phenomenal, and Dave Thomas was later able to sell his share in the restaurants back to to Sanders for $1.5 million, thus giving him the capital to open Wendy’s. He’d later use this advertising formula to great effect in his own restaurants, appearing in over 800 commercials.

Despite its feel-good American dream origins, Wendy’s is not immune from the bizarre. In 2005, an employee named Steve LeMay and a co-worker were caught robbing the safe from the Manchester, NH store where they worked. The co-worker’s name? Ronald MacDonald.

In a previous list, I detailed the immense popularity of KFC on Christmas Eve in Japan, with lines snaking out the door. While business thrives in America, you aren’t likely to see that kind of rush the next time you stop in for a bucket of chicken. Unless you’d happened by in early May of 2009. None other than Oprah Winfrey advertised on her show that a coupon could be downloaded on her website for a free grilled chicken meal at KFC. According to a KFC press release, they received “unprecedented and overwhelming response”, which is the politically correct way of saying that the campaign turned into a complete circus. Millions of coupons were printed, the website couldn’t handle the traffic, and hordes of people descended on the restaurants, which quickly ran out of food. By the time KFC axed the program, an astonishing 10.5 million coupons were printed, which were eventually honored with rainchecks.

Whenever the subject of the frivolity of lawsuits comes up, the 1992 McDonald’s coffee case always pops into the conversation. While on its surface, it sounds ridiculous that someone should be able to sue a restaurant for Stella Liebeck burning herself with a beverage that by its very nature is supposed to be hot, there are several less obvious elements at play. First, McDonald’s served its coffee extremely hot—in excess of 180 degrees (your home coffeemaker will generally clock in around 140), and Liebeck suffered horrifying third degree burns right down to the bone. There are pictures available online, but I don’t suggest you look for them unless you have a strong stomach.

Second, Liebeck did not sue McDonald’s hoping to reap a fortune. Initially, the 79 year old only wanted a settlement to cover her medical expenses, which were in excess of $10,000. McDonald’s offered a mere $800.

Liebeck retained an attorney, and much legal wrangling followed. McDonald’s staunchly refused to settle despite multiple attempts to mediate the case before trial. During the court hearing, it came to light that the restaurant had fielded hundreds of complaints about burns from their coffee, and had settled many claims in the past, some for as much as $500,000. This was pretty much the kiss of death for McDonald’s; the jury awarded Stella Liebeck $2.86 million. The judge reduced the settlement, and both McDonald’s and Liebeck appealed. Before further legal proceedings occurred, both parties settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.

Tim Hortons is a Canadian donut chain, with some presence in the United States, and some scattered stores in the United Arab Emirates and Oman. Unlike a lot of restaurants, Tim Hortons was named for a real person—professional NHL defenseman Miles Gilbert “Tim” Horton, who played for several teams, including the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Buffalo Sabres. On February 21, 1974, Horton was driving home from a hockey game in Toronto in his De Tomaso Pantera sports car. When police attempted to pull him over, he fled, reaching speeds over 100mph. When rounding a curve, he lost control of the car and hit a concrete culvert. Horton, who was not wearing a seatbelt, was killed instantly. It was discovered that his blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit. Horton’s business partner promptly paid his widow $1 million for her shares in the restaurant chain. Today, the company’s revenue exceeds $2.5 billion.

Most would agree that their neighborhood pizzeria serves far better fare than Pizza Hut, whose formulaic, prepackaged recipes do very little to stimulate the palate. But the local joint will only deliver in a five mile radius. Pizza Hut delivered to space. In April of 2001, the company paid the Russian space program approximately a million dollars to take a pizza aboard a rocket sent to resupply the International Space Station orbiting earth. Rolled into the price was a photo op with cosmonaut Yuri Usachov, who offered a thumbs up after receiving his snack. Since it is difficult to taste things in zero gravity, the vacuum sealed salami pie they delivered was heavily spiced.

Rahm Emanuel isn’t exactly a household name, but he has maintained a distinguished career in American politics, serving in multiple advisory positions to Presidents Clinton and Obama, most notably as White House Chief of Staff. He is currently Mayor of Chicago. In high school, Emanuel worked part time at an Arby’s restaurant, a chain known for its roast beef sandwiches. One day, while operating the meat slicer, he severely cut his right middle finger. Being a teenager, he eschewed getting stitches and decided to go for a swim in Lake Michigan. Infection set in, and doctors were forced to amputate the top of his finger.

As an interesting aside, one of Rahm’s brothers is Hollywood superagent Ari Emanuel, the person on whom the character Ari Gold is based on in the show “Entourage”.

Mark Cuban is one of the world’s richest men, a dot com billionaire who owns the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and regularly features on the NBC show “Shark Tank”, investing in startup businesses. In 2002, the outspoken Cuban lashed out at Ed Rush, the NBA’s head of officiating, claiming that he wouldn’t hire Rush to manage a Dairy Queen. He was fined half a million dollars by the NBA for his big mouth. The popular ice cream chain took offense at Cuban’s insult, inviting him to manage a Dairy Queen for a day if he thought it was so easy. He accepted, good naturedly serving cones and signing autographs at a store in Coppell, Texas. The event was a media circus, with lines over an hour long. Cuban had considerable trouble mastering the swirl of a soft serve cone, telling customers “Be patient with me, please. I’m new at this. It might not be pretty, but it works.”

Subway is the world’s largest restaurant chain—as of this writing, there are 39,517 Subways operating around the globe, in 102 countries and territories. The most exclusive location? Inside 1 World Trade Center. The restaurant sits inside a trailer-like “pod” that is lifted up level by level as the construction of the skyscraper progresses, from the ground all the way up to the planned 105th floor. The restaurant was opened to cater to union workers, who only have half hour lunch breaks, and thus couldn’t leave the premises for food, since leaving required waiting for a hoist to bring them back to ground level.

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Multi tasking is a myth, the human brain simply wasn’t designed to focus on two things at once and magicians take full advantage. Our attention is pulled to one thing in particular due to the ‘moving-spotlight‘ theory. In short, the theory says that our attention is like a spotlight, highlighting one thing while leaving what surrounds it in the dark. When an item or action is within the spotlight the parts of the brain involved in processing it work more efficiently, but anything beyond the spotlight is barely processed at all, at least not by our conscious mind. This allows magicians to pull a sleight of hand right under our noses, as long as something else is drawing our spotlight what happens beyond it, to our brain isn’t happening at all.

The ‘misinformation effect’ occurs when information we are given after an event alters our memory of it. For example, a magician asks you to choose a card from the left side of the deck and return it without telling him. Before the razzle-dazzle where he guesses your card he may say something like ‘Now you chose any card you wanted, correct?’ And in the heat of the moment you will say you did. The truth is you were only given the option of the left side of the deck, but the ambiguous comments from the magician alters how you remember the trick, leaving you with a false memory making the trick seem perhaps more incredible than it was.

When you see a ball get thrown in the air, it comes back down. You’ve a seen it a million times. You know that what comes up must come down and so does your brain. In fact because of something called the ‘Memory-prediction framework’ our brain sometimes remembers certain actions so well, it stops paying close attention because it predicts how they will end. When a ball gets thrown in the air our brain instantaneously recalls memories of similar events and produces an idea of what’s going to happen next, but sometimes it’s wrong. When a magician puts a ball in a cup only to have it disappear when the cup is lifted, we are shocked because what our brain predicted didn’t come true. Our brains often feed us a prediction and convinces us we saw it happen, which leaves us even more shocked when the predicted action didn’t happen at all.

When we ‘pick a card, any card’ we are very rarely picking at random, no matter what it seems. It is usually the magician choosing for us, only without our knowledge. In many card tricks the card we apparently choose is ‘forced’ meaning the magician did something, mental or physical, to make us choose exactly what they wanted us to. But our brain will often over look or deny this as an option, in favor of free choice. Our brain simply does not want to believe it was forced and will often omit facts that may indicate that it was, instead jumping fully into the false idea that all choices were all our own.

The ‘woman sawed in half trick’ is old enough that most people know the secret. The head we see in one end of the box doesn’t belong to the legs we see at the other. But our brain insists and assumes it does, why? Because our brain is a sucker for continuity. When it sees a head in rough alignment with a set of legs it uses past experience to fill in the blank and tell us that obviously a torso exists between those two body parts. In many magic tricks an object is partially covered, and our brain uses what it CAN see to continue the image and fill in the blank, of course that is exactly what the magician wants.

Quick, look out the window. What did you see? Now look again, has anything changed? If the first time all you saw was your backyard and the second time there was a tiger, well you’re probably going to notice. But what if that bird perched in the tree moved slightly? What if a plant had moved in the wind? Our brains are susceptible to something called ‘change-blindness’ basically meaning that it’s actually quite bad at immediately detecting small changes. Its not necessarily that we don’t see them, but more that our brains have trained themselves not to worry about changes that won’t greatly affect us and as a result, if we aren’t very specifically focusing on something we’ll rarely register it consciously. Obviously magicians can utilize this to the extreme, we never notice small changes in what’s going on until the magician directs our focus to it.

Our Brain insists we have free will, and it also insists that it’s always right. Due to something called ‘Cognitive Dissonance’ our brain will make up excuses to rationalize events, even if it means you are going against what you thought or felt only minutes earlier. Our brain will force us to justify events if they don’t go how we expected. Magicians present a reality that doesn’t obey the idea of reality your brain is used to seeing. This creates a cognitive dissonance and a point is eventually reached where, no matter how hard it tries, your brain cannot rationalize the events it’s just seen. Our brain is used to rationalizing events after they occur, magic creates a situation which can’t exist and that leads to the unique sense of astonishment we feel.

You’ve probably seen any number of internet illusions where you stare at a black image then stare at a white wall to find the image still exists in your vision. That’s called an after-image and it’s really your brain seeing something for a short time after its gone. A magician can use this when switching an item from hand to hand, to your brain a coin may appear to be in one hand slightly longer than it was due to an after image, which gives the magician a fraction of a second longer to make the switch. A magician might even use an after image to remove your watch. Squeezing your wrist can leave an ‘after image’ feeling, leading your brain to believe your watch is still there even after it has been expertly removed.

Simply speaking, when your brain sees something new, fast and exciting it is helpless not to take notice. Due to ‘exogenous attentional capture’ your brain will always be drawn to something new that it has trouble predicting. A dove erratically flying from a hat will have the attention of you almost immediately as your brain takes at least a few seconds to process the event and asses its importance. Even a fast, curving hand movement will draw more attention than a slow straight one, magicians know this and will use exciting actions that your brain can’t help but look at.

Many magicians use humor in their acts in an attempt to charm their audience into submission. But this charm and charisma is actually having a chemical affect on your brain. It’s possible that the simple act of laughing with (or at) the magician’s terrible puns releases Oxytocin, the bonding hormone. Which makes acts of cooperation and social interaction feel good. Oxytocin release means you are less likely to be critical of the tricks you’re watching and even more likely to miss sleights of hand as you’re attention will be drawn to the magicians face. So everything, even the terrible puns are part of the trick.

Scott tweets @frigginboom. He also films himself.

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The Carnac stones are a dense collection of more than three thousand standing stones around the French village of Carnac—the largest such collection in the world.  The stones were erected between 4500 and 3300 B.C.

There is a variety of theories as to the purpose of the stones. Some claim that the stones are aligned astronomically, with the intention of creating an observatory or a calendar system.  Others believe that they were actually used as primitive seismic instruments, with the balanced stones acting as earthquake detectors.  The Carnac site is also thought to support the controversial idea of the “megalithic yard”, a theoretical common unit of measurement that was used to build most megalithic sites.

In the ancient quarries near Aswan, Egypt, lies a gigantic piece of stone which was intended to be erected as an obelisk.  The obelisk was never finished, likely due to cracks which formed in the stone during the quarrying (although some believe the builders may have been violently interrupted).  

The sheer size of this object is what makes it remarkable. It would have been a full third larger than any other ancient obelisk known to us.  Standing 137 feet (42m) tall and weighing 1200 tons, this single piece of rock would have been taller than a ten-storey building.  There are very few modern cranes that could move such a massive object—so how exactly did the ancient Egyptians plan on transporting and erecting it?

The three most important dolmens (or passage mounds) in Spain—Cueva de Menga, Cueva de Viera, and the Tholos of El Romeral—are some of the largest in the world.  The largest stones used in their construction weigh one hundred and eighty tons, and were transported from at least a mile away.  The sites, which are located near the town of Antequera, are believed to have been established around 3700 B.C.—making them a contemporary of many famous megalithic sites such as Stonehenge.

Many of the walls feature anthropomorphic illustrations.  Menga is aligned with the summer solstice, and El Romeral shares several traits and characteristics with tholos dolmens discovered on Crete, which suggests contact with the Minoan civilization.

Ggantija is a complex of two megalithic temples on the Maltese island of Gozo.  The stone temples were constructed around 3600 B.C., making them the second-oldest religious structures ever found, just behind Gobekli Tepe.  For a little context, it’s worth remembering that this was a time when metal tools were not available to the natives of the Maltese islands, and the wheel had not yet been invented.  

It is believed that Ggantija may have been the site of a fertility cult, as figurines and statuettes associated with fertility have been discovered there.  Small spherical stones have also been discovered, which archeologists believe may have been used as ball bearings in the transport of the massive stone blocks which make up the temples.  All that being said, we still don’t know how or why the temples were built.

Ranging in size from a few centimeters to more than two meters in diameter, and weighing fifteen tons, a collection of over two hundred stone spheres has been found in Costa Rica. The spheres are believed to have been carved between 1500 and 500 B.C. by a civilization long since disappeared, although exact dating is impossible.  

There are numerous myths and legends relating to the spheres, with some claiming that they are relics of Atlantis, and others claiming that the builders possessed a potion which softened rock.  Although the stones have been weathered, damaged, and eroded over the centuries, some believe they were originally carved into perfect spheres. Once again, we still don’t know what purpose was served by these stones.

The Olmec heads are a collection of seventeen colossal heads, carved from stone.  The heads date from 1500–1000 B.C., and weigh between six and fifty tons.  Each head is carved with a unique headdress, leading some to believe that they were meant to be representations of powerful Olmec rulers.  Others claim that the face structure featured on the heads resembles that of an African male, suggesting that this might be evidence of an advanced African civilization visiting the Americas in prehistoric times.

In 1987, a group of strange formations was found underwater off the coast of Yonaguni Island.  These formations feature flat parallel edges, right angles, sharp edges, pillars, and columns—leading many to believe that the site could be man-made.  

The last time this area would have been dry land was eight to ten thousand years ago, during the most recent ice age—and so if Yonaguni really was constructed by humans, it would be one of the oldest structures on Earth, and would drastically change what we think we know of prehistory.

In 2001, evidence of a sunken city was found off the coast of India, in the Gulf of Cambay.  Several manmade structures have been identified using sonar, including large buildings and canals.  Artifacts such as pottery shards and hearth materials have been dredged up from the bottom.

The scale of the city is quite large, especially considering the fact that one piece of wood has been dated from as early as 9500 BC.  If it really existed back then, the city would be thousands of years older than the previous oldest city found in India, and would have existed thousands of years before humans were thought to be building cities of this size.  

There are some people who scoff at the suggested date, saying that the carbon-dated wood proves nothing—but all the same, there is enough evidence to make this site one of the most intriguing in the world.

On Easter Island—one of the most remote inhabited islands on Earth—lies one of the world’s most famous mysteries.  The giant stone statues (Moai) of Easter Island are a favorite of tourists—but little is actually known about them.  Although it was thought at first that the statues were merely heads, excavation has shown almost all of them to have bodies.   Very few of the statues were ever actually erected; most were left in quarries, or abandoned during transport.  

Archeologists don’t know why the statues were built, what they signified, how they were transported and erected, or why they were abandoned unfinished.  There is a form of hieroglyphic writing on some of the statues, which nobody has been able to translate.  The people of Easter Island themselves are something of a mystery; it remains unclear where they originally came from.  

One of the wildest theories about Easter Island has it that the island is actually the peak of an underwater mountain—and all that remains of the lost civilization of Mu.

Gobekli Tepe is generally considered to be the oldest religious structure ever found.  Radiocarbon dating puts the site at between 10,000 and 9000 B.C. To put this age in perspective, more time passed between the building of Gobekli Tepe and the building of Stonehenge than between the building of Stonehenge and present day.

The site contains stone structures and stone pillars which feature carvings of various predatory animals. The stone pillars—some of them reaching nearly twenty tons in weight—date to a time when humans were thought to be simple hunter-gatherers. Gobekli Tepe seems to have been built before the advent of agriculture, religion, written language, the wheel, pottery, the domestication of animals, and the use of anything other than simple stone tools.  

How were these structures built at a time when humans are basically thought have been cavemen?  How did they quarry huge pieces of stone, and cut them to size with no metal tools?  What was the purpose of such a site, before religion was thought to have been established?  The discovery and ongoing excavation of Gobekli Tepe could eventually change our conception of prehistory forever.

Mark Thompson is an animal lover from Canada who wishes he was an animal lover from somewhere warmer.

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