Grab Bag: Odds and Ends About Oddities
I like oddities from all areas of science, history, and
technology. A lot of the oddities you
find on the internet and in books are fabricated, misinterpreted, or hard to
verify.
What got me on this topic today was seeing FaceBook posts on
a weird, very loud sound nicknamed Julia, which NOAA recorded in the Southern
Ocean in 1999. The story that keeps being repeated is that NASA’s Apollo 33A5
mission photographed a gigantic shadow in the water there. While the sound – ascribed to an iceberg
rubbing against the seafloor – IS weird, the story immediately falls apart
because no NASA mission or experiment ever had a number anything like 33A5 or
operated in 1999 (there were 17 numbered Apollo missions, and they ended in
1972. Anyone with an internet account
can falsify it in about 30 seconds. For some reason, that doesn’t work.
Some others:.
No, there was not a Canadian “Eskimo village” whose
population disappeared: that seems to have been inspired by the movie The
Deadly Mantis. (Watch it, it’s a hoot.)
I once wrote to the RCMP to double-check.
No, there are not fossils/remains of American giants hidden
away by "science" Some 19th-century newspaper articles and photos have
never checked out as anything but hoaxes.
A farmer named David Lang did not vanish as he was crossing
his Tennessee field in 1880. He didn’t exist.
Because a phenomenon is famous, that doesn’t make it real.
Spook Hill in Florida is a real place, but the terrain tricks the eye: nothing
pulls your car uphill. Board Camp
Crystal Mine in Arkansas draws attention because the owners, who host tourists,
claim strange lights circulate while rocks levitate. Geologist Sharon Hill explains things here.
An interesting example of a proper investigation of an
oddity is how Lawrence Kusche demystified much of the “Bermuda Triangle” story by checking
weather records and determining that many disappearances were in bad weather
even though authors repeated each other as saying the weather had been
good.
So what oddities are worth pondering?
In my favorite oddity topic, cryptozoology, the Nicoll /
Meade-Waldo “sea serpent” sighting of 1907 remains a puzzle. There are other
hard-to-explain sightings of such things, but if this one was explained, I’d be
more willing to dump the subject. The
“yeti” tracks from Eric Shipton and Michael Ward is in this category. There’s no evidence of a hoax, except that no
one has since found tracks as good (or the Yeti), but I’d like to know. Wilson’s whale, painted from like in
Antarctica in 1902, hasn’t been explained. No one’s found the weird screw-like
colonial invertebrate (I assume that’s what it is) photographed by underwater
camera on an oil rig and nicknamed “Marvin.”
Some things that are lost to history are interesting,
although not “odd” in the fringe/paranormal sense. I write space history, and I
learned the Soviet Union had a well-placed spy in Wernher von Braun’s German
rocket organization. Stalin read the spy’s reports personally. Who was he, or she? Seventy-five years on, no one knows.
The Voynich Manuscript remains undecoded. It has been
claimed to be a hoax, although it would be an elaborate and pointless one.
Claims of partial translations are, so far, not very convincing. Even if we
knew what it said, we wouldn’t know what long-dead hand wrote and illustrated
it. https://coolinterestingstuff.com/is-the-voynich-manuscript-a-hoax
I’ll do more Grab Bags in the future. Just getting this one
off my brain. I hope you enjoy it.
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