mystery

A large unknown mammal discovered in the Amazon

April 17, 2015 / environment, Latin America / , , , , ,
"Tropical Waterfall" by Vichaya Kiatying-Angsulee
“Tropical Waterfall” by Vichaya Kiatying-Angsulee

In an earlier blog post I discussed the fact that explorers and scientists are still making major new discoveries on our mysterious planet. If any still place holds many surprises it must be the Amazon. In 2009 I was staying in a lodge on the Rio Negro near Manaus, in the midst of the worst flooding that the Amazon had seen in sixty years. My wife and I took our two daughters down to the bank of the river. Swarms of small insects were attracted to the lights on the river bank. Fish would rise to the surface and surge up to catch the insects. And as we watched, a bat flew past and captured a fish, which hung twisting and flopping in its clutches. It happened so fast that I couldn’t believe what I had just witnessed. I think that I began my sentence, “that almost looked as if that bat just. . . ” But a minute later it happened again, and there was no question. There really are fish-eating bats in the Amazon. But now scientists have found something not only amazing but also unknown- at least to outsiders. …

A large unknown mammal discovered in the AmazonRead More »

Cicada 3301

December 7, 2018 / mystery, security / , ,
"Cicada" by thawats at freedigitalphotos.net
“Cicada” by thawats at freedigitalphotos.net

I have covered many international mysteries on this blog, such as the strange story of the Arctic Sea, the puzzle of the Vela Incident,and the peculiar case of the ghost ship the Baltimore.  I’ve noticed that these posts usually are among the blog’s most popular. I don’t think, however, that any of these mysteries perhaps is as strange as the new puzzle of Cicada 3301. If you are curious, you will want to read Chris Bell’s account in today’s National Post. Bell describes how amateur cryptographers and hackers were enticed by a message in an internet forum called 4chan in January 2012, which appeared to contain hidden information encoded in the form of steganography. Those who tried to solve the problem soon walked through a door into an Alice of Wonderland world, with multiple cryptographic challenges. This puzzle was posed by an organization (almost certainly not an individual) with eclectic interests, which ranged from Mayan numbers to a British occult figure. How many groups would include references to medieval Welsh literature and King Arthur in the midst of an advanced cryptographic mystery? What was most staggering about this project was not the skills of the individuals involved -although they were prodigious- but rather the fact that their motive and identity both remained unknown. They appeared to be recruiting for some secret organization. Guesses about its identity have ranged from the NSA to the hackers group Anonymous. It could be a government agency, organized crime or a private firm. Some people even argued that this was an alternative reality game. But if so, it would have taken a group with immense resources (or that was very skilled at mass collaboration) to pull it off. …

Cicada 3301Read More »

Mystery Kidney Ailment in Central America: EKD

April 18, 2015 / global health, Latin America, mystery / , , , ,
"Panama Cathedral" by David Castillo Dominici at freedigitalphotos.net
“Panama Cathedral” by David Castillo Dominici at freedigitalphotos.net

Regular readers of this blog have probably noticed the attention with which I am following the emergence of a new disease in Central America, called CKD or Chronic Kidney Disease. The disease has caused devastation in some rural communities, particularly in both Nicaragua and El Salvador. What is distinct is that it particularly hits men, not women, especially those employed in the sugar cane industry. But the evidence for this is somewhat contradictory, as men employed in other physically demanding jobs also seem to be falling ill with the condition. …

Mystery Kidney Ailment in Central America: EKDRead More »

Broken Arrow: Lost Nuclear Weapons in Canada

June 24, 2017 / mystery, security / , , , ,
Image of Boeing B-52H by Tim Beach courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Within the U.S. military, the code term for a lost nuclear weapon is “Broken Arrow.” There have been many such incidents, from the dangerous accident in Savannah, Georgia, to the four nuclear weapons lost near Palomares, Spain. But what many people may not know was that the first nuclear weapons were lost in Canada. On February 13, 1950 a U.S. B-36 bomber, Flight 075, traveling from Alaska to Fort Worth Texas, had three engines catch fire, from what was later discovered to be a design flaw. The plane carried a Mark Four nuclear weapon, which was made with uranium but had a core of lead. The captain made the decision to jettison the bomb off the Canadian coast, after setting the weapon to airburst at 3000 feet. The bomb vanished in a conventional explosion, which rained uranium down onto the coast. The pilot then changed course back over land, where 16 crew members bailed out around midnight near Princess Royale Island. The plane itself flew on into the dark using auto-pilot. The bomber ultimately crashed into a mountainside in Northern BC. By this point, Strategic Command knew that they had lost a plane and a nuclear weapon, and the search was on. Twelve of the bomber’s crew were found alive. The bomber itself was only found in 1953 on the slopes of Mount Kologet. To this day, how the plane was found 200 miles from where the crew jumped, at a higher elevation, and in the opposite direction to that set on autopilot, remains a mystery.

…

Broken Arrow: Lost Nuclear Weapons in CanadaRead More »

The Strange Life and Death of Walter Benjamin

April 17, 2015 / mystery, Theory / ,
“Books” by Healing Dream at freedigitalphotos.net

Last week in my “Theoretical Foundations of Global Studies” class I discussed Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School. Of course, this meant discussing Walter Benjamin, an eclectic yet influential theorist. Benjamin was born into a well-to-do Jewish family in Germany in 1882. He was horrified by World War One, and left the country to study in Switzerland, where he received his doctorate from the University of Bern in 1919. He had difficulty finding an academic job after he returned to Germany, but he continued to write in a wide range of fields, including art, translation, poetry, history and literature.  He also considered himself to be a psychonaut, and carried out extensive experimentation with hashish and morphine. Given his background as a failed academic, he might have appeared unlikely to become an influential figure, but his critical ideals in the humanities, and skeptical vision of modernity, led him to become important not only in literary criticism but also Critical Theory. …

The Strange Life and Death of Walter BenjaminRead More »

Mystery Epidemic In Central America: CKD

April 17, 2015 / global health, Latin America, mystery / , , ,
Image of Sugar Cane field from freedigitalphotos.net

In an earlier post, I talked about some mystery diseases globally. None, however, may have affected as many people as a strange kidney disease impacting sugar cane workers in Central America. As a recent article states, the suffering in some communities in the region has been immense: “In the past 10 years, it’s believed that hundreds, if not thousands, of residents of Chichigalpa — mostly male sugarcane workers — have died from chronic kidney disease, or CKD. That in a city of nearly 60,000, roughly the size of Ames, Iowa.” One study of a farming community in El Salvador found that one quarter of men were suffering from signs of CKD. In another community, La Isla, Nicaragua, allegedly seventy percent of men have the disease.

At this point people are blaming a host of different factors for the disease: pesticides, dehydration and arsenic. Unsurprisingly, the sugar industry denies that its actions could be responsible in any way for the illness. One spokesperson told Kerry Sanders and Lisa Riordan Seville at NBC News that the root of the problem might be alcohol or volcanoes: …

Mystery Epidemic In Central America: CKDRead More »

Three Mystery Epidemics

April 17, 2015 / Africa, Asia, global health, Latin America, mystery / , , , , , ,

The World Health Organization is an under-appreciated institution, which often takes on critical tasks. For example, in 2011 it brokered an agreement to end a controversy about viral sample sharing particularly related to avian influenza. This agreement will greatly help with the development of pre-pandemic vaccines, but such achievements attract little press coverage. The WHO receives much more press when it acts as the world’s medical sleuth. When invited, it quickly arrives on the scene wherever a new disease is emerging. At the moment there are no fewer than three new diseases that merit the WHO’s attention. Although they may not each be the next SARS, they all have worrisome aspects.

…

Three Mystery EpidemicsRead More »

The Mystery of the Arctic Sea

April 17, 2015 / mystery, security / , , , , ,
"Sea Victim" by Evgeni Dinev at freedigitalphotos.net
“Sea Victim” by Evgeni Dinev at freedigitalphotos.net

In July 2009 the world was fascinated by the mystery surrounding the cargo ship the Arctic Sea. American owned, Canadian operated, based in Malta, and with a Russian crew, the ship had taken on a load of timber in Finland, which it was delivering to Algeria. It never arrived. After passing through the English channel, its tracking system was shut off, and the ship disappeared from the world. It was amazing enough that in an era of satellites and modern navigation systems an entire ship could disappear. But then came the remarkable announcement that in July the ship had been taken over by pirates in the waters off Sweden. The men had approached the ship, and -in English- claimed to be police. They took over the ship, and interrogated the crew, before leaving hours later. But first they allegedly had disabled communications equipment and confiscated the crews’ phones. This was unusual enough, as there had been no pirates in the Baltic in living memory, or for centuries for that matter. The ship was in one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. Even stranger, however, was what happened next- the ship continued on its way without stopping for authorities to investigate the crime (for a timeline of events, click here). …

The Mystery of the Arctic SeaRead More »

The Vela Incident

June 24, 2017 / mystery, security / , , ,
Image of satellite courtesy of dream designs at freedigitalphotos

On September 22, 1979 an aging American spy satellite detected a powerful flash of light that was so deep in the southern oceans that it was unclear if the flash was in the South Atlantic or the Indian ocean. National Security authorities soon notified President Jimmy Carter that there had been a nuclear test. But had there really been one? The issue mattered because at the heart of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treat of 1963 was the belief that the United States (and the Soviet Union) could detect clandestine explosions. The President convened a special task force to determine what the satellite had observed. In the end, the committee decided that the flash most likely resulted from a micro-meteorite hitting the satellite, rather than an event on earth. Many defense observers with considerable expertise held a different view. The debate has continued over three decades, with the consensus shifting as first one piece of new evidence comes forward, only to be countered by the next revelation. So what exactly happened deep over the southern oceans? …

The Vela IncidentRead More »

The Lost Island of Bermeja

October 21, 2019 / Latin America, mystery / , , ,

The world is filled with mythical islands, maybe because the idea of an isolated place evokes ideas of a utopia. Perhaps that is why Judith Schalansky’s

Image of islands courtesy of Liz Noffsinger at freedigitalphotos

Atlas of Remote Islands became a popular book. But few mythical islands islands have been as enduring as Bermeja, which cartographers have been placing on maps off the coast of the Yucatan since Alonso de Santa Cruz first mentioned it in 1539.  In the nineteenth century something strange happened. The island disappeared, likely because it had never existed. But the power of this idea is so strong that people continue to look for it, including a BBC film crew.

What is more important, however, is the popular view of the island in Mexico. How is that an island that existed on maps for centuries could disappear? A cynic might wonder if map-makers had been copying each others’ maps for centuries. But within Mexico there are conspiracy theories, which argue that the United States destroyed it. Because Mexico lost so much of its national territory to the United States in the U.S.-Mexican War, there is a profound distrust of the U.S. in Mexico. Much of Mexico’s national budget comes from the operations of the state oil company PEMEX, which pumps much of its oil from the Gulf of Mexico. And a June 2000 treaty between Mexico and the United States defined rights to oil reserves based on the distance from U.S. or Mexican territory, in particular islands. For this reason, one can find Youtube clips blaming the United States for dynamiting the island into oblivion, and calling on Mexicans to be aware of what has been stolen from them. Posts about this are easy to find on the web. Mexican radio stations and TV news also discuss this topic, as these Youtube clips (for those who speak Spanish) show. …

The Lost Island of BermejaRead More »

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. See our Privacy Policy for details. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use. If you do not consent, click here to opt out of Google Analytics.