The Gettysburg Dime Museum is a recreation of a 19th century dime museum.  Loaded with oddities and curiosities, the museum exhibits a mixture of authentic and not-so-authentic artifacts leaving it to the visitor to distinguish between the two. Exhibits include: freaks of nature, true crime, voodoo mysteries, legendary creatures, historical enigmas, wonders of the world, and medical quackery.

In its heyday in the 1960s and 70s, Yenching Palace was a landmark in Washington, D.C. Known for its iconic neon sign with the confusing backwards “Y,” it was frequented by celebrities and politicians. Today, it’s a humble Walgreens, tucked between Fire Department Engine Company 28 and a 7-Eleven.

It would be easy to walk by and have no idea the old building once served up Chinese food to guests like Mick Jagger, Art Garfunkel, Ann Landers, Henry Kissinger, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Or that a crucial moment in American history took place here: It was the final meeting place in negotiations to between the U.S. and Russia to resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis and avoid nuclear war.

As the story goes, ABC newsman John Scali, representing President John Kennedy, and Soviet Embassy counselor (and senior K.G. B. officer)  Aleksander Fomin, representing the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, met covertly at Yenching in 1962 in second to last booth on the left to iron out the details of an agreement.

There are, of course, scant few details on the meeting, but the New York Times reported that the negotiations took place over the course of several meetings in local Washington establishments. Over lunch at the Willard Hotel the terms for settlement of the crisis were proposed—the promise not to invade Cuba in exchange for the missiles being removed—and the terms were agreed upon later at the Statler coffee shop. The next day the two men celebrated the conflict resolution with a Chinese dinner at Yenching Palace.

Yenching Palace was opened in 1955 by Van Lung, the son of Chinese warlord. Ownership passed down to his nephew, who, facing rising costs, leased the iconic building to Walgreens in 2007. 

Ever since the insane fervor surrounding Cabbage Patch Kids in the 1980s, or the Tickle Me Elmo doll in 1996, trying to predict what the hot toy of each holiday season is going to be has become an annual ritual for consumers and reviewers alike.

But how do the prognosticators of childhood delights even go about figuring out what will become the most sought after item of the year?To find out how it’s done, we talked to editor-in-chief of The Toy Insider, Jackie Breyer, who has been reporting on the toy industry for more than 14 years. Turns out it isn’t magic or marketing, but more about how fun and educational a toy might actually be.

“We’re not just looking at what are the hot toys, we’re also looking at what are the ‘right’ toys," Breyer says. "You know, what’ll be fun, what’ll fit varying skill sets and all different kinds of kids."

Different reviewers have their own methods for choosing which toys they are going to augur for the Christmas season, but for The Toy Insider, which releases a handful of lists of the best toys of the year, there are specific criteria.

One of the first things they consider is play value, which is how much use is a toy going to get compared to how much it costs. Which isn’t to say that a toy needs to become a family heirloom to be considered. “Some one-trick-pony type of toys are a lot of fun and still worth the money for that novelty," says Breyer.

Next, they take originality into consideration. “There’s hundreds of toys out there and it’s important to give your kids unique toys to keep them busy and engaged,” says Breyer. Lots of toys mimic the play patterns of existing or older toys, but they need to bring something new to the field. That can be a twist on an existing toy, or a wholly new concept, like one of this year's hot games, Speak Out, which involves trying to speak through a mouthguard.

But it’s not all just fun and games. Breyer says that they also consider what kind of skill-building a toy can provide to a child, and this doesn't necessarily mean it has to be an outwardly educational toy. While many toys are specifically designed to simultaneously teach and entertain, a good toy, or even a game like Dungeons & Dragons, can teach subtler lessons. Role play can teach kids how to interact with people, and games that incorporate puzzles can reinforce problem solving. “Anything that contributes to a kid’s development. Maybe it teaches a lesson of some kind. Maybe it improves emotional intelligence,” says Breyer.

There is also product integrity, which refers to whether a toy lives up to its advertised promises, and whether it’s actually a quality product. Reviewers will consider whether the materials are cheap and breakable, for instance, and whether the toy can do everything it is shown to do in its marketing. In the '90s, commercials for the board game Guess Who? showed the characters on the game cards moving and talking. In reality, they did neither. Product integrity: compromised.

Then finally, there is that ineffable “fun factor.” It might be hard to quantify, but you know a fun toy when you get your hands on one. “They need to be engaging, exciting, really just fun,” says Breyer.  “Did we laugh, or did we smile, or did we laugh while playing with it, and do we think kids will do the same?”

While all of these things are taken into consideration when looking at a year’s worth of buzzworthy toys, some might see such picks as little more than advertising for big toy companies. Breyer doesn’t deny that marketing does play a small role in their choices, “There are many toy manufacturers who have great PR and marketing teams. They make sure that we’re aware of their products,” she says. “If you’re manufacturing a product and not telling anybody about it, it’s not going to be as well known.”

The Toy Insider has already released its lists of popular toys for 2016, and they show many of the popular trends for this year. STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) toys are encouragingly popular. Specifically, toys designed to teach children computer coding seem to be taking off across the age spectrum, with one of the hottest toys of the year looking to be Fisher-Price’s Code-A-Pillar, which teaches kids aged three to six basic concepts about coding with a programmable caterpillar. Other hits include robot pets like CHiP the Robot Dog, and the Zoomer Chimp, which is a robo-monkey with realistic movement. 

But maybe this season’s true successor to the Tickle Me Elmo is a new toy known as a Hatchimal, which features a robotic baby animal breaking out of an egg. Of course, Breyer saw this coming. “We saw Hatchimals for the first time at New York Toy Fair in February this year,” she says. “As soon as we saw it, we all just looked at each other and said, ‘Whoa. Kids are going to love this.’ You just know. It’s got that wow factor.”

The men in the photos look a little bored and awkward, maybe uncomfortable or even tense. The more you know about the photos, the more you read into them. But without context, what you see is young men assembled in rows for a formal group photo, staring into the camera or glumly off to the side. It could be a group photo of colleagues or a social club—a hum-drum setup. But stare longer and it’s obvious: In each photo, one or more of them is giving the finger.

All of these men are prisoners, pawns during a politically tense time, and they’re defying their captors in one of the only ways available to them: By flipping the bird.

It was 1968 and the United States was solidly mired in the Cold War, spying on the Soviet Union and its allies and being spied upon in return. The U.S.S. Pueblo was a Navy intelligence ship whose cover was collecting oceanographic data (of the 83 crewmen there were two civilian oceanographers aboard), but its actual duty was collecting intelligence on Russia and North Korea.

On January 23, 1968—just 18 days into its first mission—the Pueblo was approached by a North Korean vessel near the port of Wonsan. The vessel asked them their nationality, and the Pueblo hoisted the American flag. They were told to slow and prepare to be boarded; the Pueblo crew responded that they were 15.8 miles from land, and thus in international waters. But the situation quickly grew dire—three more North Korean boats appeared, and fighter jets flew overhead.

The North Korean ship opened fire on the Pueblo, killing one of the crew and wounding others. The Pueblo was barely armed; rather than fight back they began to frantically burn and dump documents, smashing equipment with axes and hammers. The ship was boarded and the crew taken captive. Bedsheets were cut up into blindfolds; they were tied up, punched, kicked, and prodded with bayonets.

“My mother’s prediction that I would die in dirty sheets was about to come true,” wrote one crew member, Stu Russell. “And to make it worse, I had my boots on.”

Soon they were being sped toward North Korea. It was the beginning of what would be a 335-day ordeal. (The crew has written extensively about their experiences, much of it collected on a website maintained by the U.S.S. Pueblo Veterans Association.)

Upon arriving in North Korea, the Pueblo crew was marched past a hostile public to buses with covered windows that ferried them to a train, also with covered windows. The train carried them to Pyongyang, where they were displayed for the waiting press before being taken to the first of two compounds where they would live for nearly a year.

The crew dubbed their first quarters “The Barn.” There they were housed in dim, cold cells, and beaten and tortured routinely by their captors. The men grew malnourished as they ate scant meals of turnips and a foul-smelling fish they derisively called “Sewer Trout.” One man’s shrapnel wounds were treated sans anesthetic; his tonsils would also be removed without pain relief.

Russell recalled a day when he and a few other men were transported to a shed out in the woods where they were told they would take a bath. Thoughts of World War II gas chambers fresh in his mind, Russell tried to come to terms with his impending death. “I had my ticket out of Korea, I was going home,” he wrote, “I could smell the pines and actually taste the cold night air, being alive was great.” Fortunately, the men had actually been taken to a rustic bathhouse.

As the crew suffered, cut off from outside contact, the public panicked. Washington demanded the return of the ship and its crew, North Korea rebuffed such requests, insisting the boat had been in North Korean waters. U.S. officials entreated President Lyndon B. Johnson to deploy the military, if necessary, to retrieve the men. In a television appearance days after the capture, Johnson demurred that “We shall continue to use every means available to find a prompt and a peaceful solution to the problem.” (Behind the scenes, the U.S. government was considering everything from a naval blockade to a nuclear attack.)

The public bristled, they felt the men had been abandoned. The New York Times declared the incident “humiliating” and the The San Diego Union began publishing a daily counter that ticked upward with every day the crew remained in captivity. A group of citizens calling themselves the  Remember the Pueblo Committee gave speeches, churned out bumper stickers, and tried to keep the media interested in the captives.

Meanwhile, North Korean officials were launching a media campaign of their own. They filmed and photographed the men for propaganda—even putting them through the bizarre experience of re-enacting their own capture for North Korean cameras, to be distributed as propaganda. They were forced to participate in staged press conferences, where they performed exercise routines before an audience. They were made to sign false confessions and write letters to family declaring their support for North Korea.

Occasionally, the men were the audience. One day in June, the group was assembled to watch propaganda films. One was about the North Korean soccer team’s visit to London, another about the body of a U.S. soldier being returned to officials. In both films, something extraordinary happened: Someone flipped the cameraman off. In both instances, it seemed clear that the gesture didn’t translate; their captors didn’t realize that they were being insulted, and so the action was not edited out of the reels.

So began The Digit Affair.

“The finger became an integral part of our anti-propaganda campaign,” wrote Russell. “Any time a camera appeared, so did the fingers.”

You see it in a shot of three bored looking men, two of them casually propping their heads up by clearly extended middle fingers. In a group shot of the men seated in two rows, as if for a school photo, a man in the front looks directly into the camera, his hands folded in his lap, and his top middle finger popped out. In another, a fellow looks like he’s chewing his fingernail—on his middle finger.

If their captors ever noticed the gesture, they had a story prepared: It was a “Hawaiian Good Luck sign,” a cousin of the “Hang Loose” sign, comprised of thumb and pinky extended.

This wasn’t the only way the crew defied their captors. In fact it was just one of several methods they had for coping with their plight through jokes. The finger was part of a larger campaign that included embedding in-jokes in forced confessions and letters home, giving their captors mocking nicknames, and even a bawdy poem.

“It could be considered pretty sick humor,” said crewmember Bob Chicca in a Westword story detailing the way the Pueblo men launched a laughter offense. “It helped us survive and kept morale up. For that little period of time, we were in charge of our own lives.”

The triumphant reign of the Hawaiian Good Luck sign came to an abrupt end when Time magazine published a photo of the men and pointed out their ruse, writing in the caption that “three of the crewmen have managed to use the medium for a message, furtively getting off the U.S. hand signal of obscene derisiveness and contempt.”

When the crew’s captors read this, they kicked off what the men would come to call “Hell Week,” beating the crewmen mercilessly for days. During this especially bleak period, the men had no way to know they were actually close to going home.

On December 23, 1968, U.S. officials finally agreed to sign a “confession” declaring that the Pueblo had trespassed in North Korean waters, although they did so only after formally stating that they didn’t believe in the statement they were signing. Satisfied, North Korea released the prisoners, who arrived back in the states on Christmas Eve.

The crew’s relief from their ordeal was brief. A weeks-long Naval inquiry was held to investigate charges that the men had surrendered without a fight and failed to destroy classified documents aboard the Pueblo. Crewmen wept during the inquiry as they testified about the abuses suffered while held captive. Finally, the navy dismissed the case. Crew members were eventually awarded medals, including 10 men who received the Purple Heart.

One thing that did not return with the crew was the U.S.S. Pueblo. It still resides in North Korea, where it’s a tourist attraction at the Victorious War Museum in Pyongyang. 

Upon the end of his life in 1519, Emperor Maximilian I was obsessed with death. For five years, whenever he traveled he carried his coffin with him and left grotesque instructions of mutilation to his body when he died and for it to be "publicly displayed to show the perishableness of all earthly glory."

He also wished to be buried in the castle chapel in Wiener Neustadt. He envisioned a grand tomb, surrounded by 28 life-size statues of of his ancestors, real and mythical, lining his grave in a mock funeral procession.

Work on the figures began in 1502, but by 1519, only 11 had been completed. Still, molding and carving continued, financed by Maximilian’s son, Charles V, and his grandson, Ferdinand I. Over the next several decades, more black figures were added to the lineup, the last one completed in 1555.

As the progress grew, it became apparent that they would not fit into the the small, “temporary” space in Wiener Neustadt, so Ferdinand I began building a new tomb and monastery for his grandfather in Innsbruck. Completed in 1553, the gothic building was named the Hofkirche (Court Church), it was eventually fitted with a massive marble mausoleum and decorated in kingly riches.

The completed statues line the center, forged in black bronze. Now known as the “black men,” despite including several women, the noted individuals range from famous dukes and duchesses, to Holy Roman Emperors, Queens, and even mythical heroes such as King Arthur. Several are considered masterpieces of sculpture and metal work.

Unfortunately, they are cursed to watch over an empty grave. Despite the lavishness and splendor of the church, Maximillian’s remains were never brought to this sacred place and remain in their small, quaint original resting place 325 miles away.

Santa Muerte is the unsanctioned folk saint of death within Mexican Catholicism. The icon has been condemned by the Catholic church as blasphemous.

Perhaps because she is one herself, Santa Muerte is considered the patron saint of outsiders. In popular culture she's been painted as the patron saint of drug traffickers and gangsters, who are drawn to her for her deathly appeal. But she has also come to be known as a representative for trans and queer individuals, as well as undocumented immigrants. 

Though Saint Death has been around for some time in Mexico and the American Southwest (some link her to the Aztec queen of the underworld Mictecacihuatl), Santa Muerte sects have sprung up wherever there are Mexican enclaves. This short documentary from AJ+ follows the celebrations of a group of Santa Muerte devotees in Queens, New York who believe that since death comes for us all, it's best to be on her side when she does.

Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

Gas Works Park rises above the north shore of Lake Union, a vaulted rampart of rusted towers and pipelines that serve as a testament to a bygone industrial age.

Once a productive coal gasification plant, the curious structure has been preserved and repurposed as a public park since its closure in 1956.

The plant primarily provided the city with gas for energy during its half-century of operation. It was officially acquired by the City of Seattle in 1962. Landscape architect Richard Haag piloted the development of the project, and eventually went on to win an American Society of Landscape Architects Presidents Award for his design. Haag and his team were responsible for retaining most of the plant's original structure, as well as introducing oil-degrading enzymes into the surrounding area to stimulate the breakdown of toxic contaminants in the soil.

Nowadays, Gas Works Park has been expanded into seven sections open to the public, although much of the works remains fenced off due to safety concerns (forming what has been beguilingly described as the plant's "forbidden zone"). The park hosts everything from free concerts to athletic competitions to kite-flying and live action roleplaying tournaments. It remains one of the most popular free spaces in Seattle, and stands as a uniquely captivating draw to both locals and tourists alike.

Bears come in many shapes, sizes, and colors. On their hind legs, they can be as tall as eleven feet or as short as four feet. Their bodies can be very round, very muscular, or very sleek. They can be brown, black, blonde, white, or blue. Yes, blue. 

American black bears actually come in all of the colors listed above. The white ones are called Kermode bears or spirit bears. The blue ones are glacier bears, or Ursus americanus emmonsii, and were first identified in 1895. Since black bears of all different colors can reproduce and thus create offspring that are heterogeneous with respect to fur color, it is possible that two black bears with black fur might produce a cub with blue fur.

Glacier bears are mostly found in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve as well as Tongass National Forest in Alaska, with occasional sightings in the capital city of Juneau. Their fur color ranges from silvery blue to grey, and tends to be darker closer to their bodies, terminating in white tips. The coloring is not always evenly distributed. They are among the most rare bears in the world, with little concrete information known about them or their numbers.

What is known is that they are pretty similar to other black bears: They favor forests, but follow the food supply; they are omnivores whose diets include roots, berries, salmon, and large mammals depending on the time of year; they average about six feet tall; they live an average of ten years; they breed in the summer and give birth in the winter; and they retreat to their den in early winter to hibernate.

People in towns near glacier bear ranges tend to have great affection for their unique ursine neighbors. They sometimes name sports teams after them and often set up hunting regulations to protect them, lest their rare and beautiful coats come to be considered prized trophies.

In Saudi Arabia, Islamic law is sternly enforced—which means, of course, that alcohol is strictly forbidden. But as with any forbidden substance anywhere in the world, that means little behind closed doors, where alcohol flows freely for those willing and able to pay. And like any country (or state) where popular substances are illegal, Saudi Arabia teems with dealers and smugglers profiting from low availability and high demand.

But in a land where even the consumption of alcohol is punishable by prison sentences and the humiliation of public floggings, where do you store your stockpiles of bootlegged liquor away from the prying eyes of the religious and legal authorities?

Why not right under their noses?

According to a letter sent by Sir Willie Morris, the British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia in 1970, this is exactly what one gang of entrepreneurial alcohol smugglers attempted to do.

Muhammad ibn Ibrahim was the first Grand Mufti of modern Saudi Arabia. This meant he was the state’s highest legal and religious authority tasked with issuing opinions (fatwas) on any and all legal and social issues, including the consumption of alcohol and other banned substances.

A descendent of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab—the 18th-century religious scholar who helped provide the framework for the modern Saudi state—Muhammad ibn Ibrahim was far from a popular man when he died in 1969 at the age of 80, according to Morris’ letter. This was partly due to his conservative religious rulings but also due to rumored abuses of power, which included lobbying the King to lift restrictions on rent so he could make more profit on his “considerable properties.”

“Perhaps he was not so bad as his reputation but he was certainly bigoted, reactionary and mean,” Morris wrote after ibn Ibrahim’s death. “I doubt whether many people here were remembering him in their prayers.”

They weren’t remembering him in their toasts, either. Shortly after the Grand Mufti’s death, Riyadh suffered a severe shortage of bootleg liquor, and—as any casual student of economics could predict—the cost shot through the roof. The price of a case of whiskey reportedly doubled, from 700 Saudi Riyals to 1500 (approximately $400 to $2,500, adjusted for inflation). Even at that price, Morris adds, “it was almost unobtainable.”

The two events were not unrelated. According to a top Jeddah-based merchant cited in Morris’ letter, one gang of alcohol smugglers had been using the Grand Mufti’s home to store their product, reasoning that Muhammad ibn Ibrahim, having gone blind in his old age, wouldn’t know what the boxes contained even if he were to stumble upon them.

And who would think to look for bootlegged alcohol in the home of the most important religious figure in the country anyway, the man responsible for upholding the nation’s Islamic laws and principles?

Their plans hit a wall when ibn Ibrahim died. His house was sealed while the property was listed for the purpose of proving his will and, along with the Grand Mufti’s personal items, 180 cases of liquor were trapped inside “whilst,” Morris wrote, “the owners sweat and Muslims and non-Muslims alike go thirsty in a dry land.”

It’s difficult to confirm any details about this opportunistic group of bootleggers – or if the story was ever anything more than rumors and urban legend. But throughout Saudi Arabia’s modern history, tales have circulated of the different ways people have found to get around the country’s strict anti-drinking laws.

Beginning in 2015, Saudi customs officials began taking to social media to publicize some of the failed, albeit highly creative, attempts of alcohol smugglers. One man was found to have taped 14 bottles of liquor to his legs, hidden beneath his free-flowing thawb (a traditional form of loose, white robe worn by men throughout the Arabian Gulf) in an attempt to smuggle the bottles over the King Fahd Causeway that connects Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

In another more creative, albeit ultimately failed, attempt, smugglers individually wrapped 48,000 cans of Heineken in fake Pepsi labels to try and pass the beer off as harmless soft drinks. They were foiled by shoddy workmanship (the labels easily peeled) and an eye for detail among the customs officials. 

ملصقات "مشروب بيبسي" على 48 ألف علبة بيرة بالكحول كشف محاولة تهريبها جمرك البطحاءhttps://t.co/BwpTaeQs1npic.twitter.com/gpf9p7ZK1Z

— الجمارك السعودية (@KsaCustoms) November 11, 2015

From the twitter account of Saudi Arabia's customs department, an attempt to smuggle in beer by disguising it as Pepsi. 

جمرك جسر الملك فهد يُحبط محاولة تهريب كمية من الخمور مخبأة أسفل الثوب الذي يرتديه المهربhttps://t.co/9clje1YiRMpic.twitter.com/D0XDKbMTnm

— الجمارك السعودية (@KsaCustoms) January 24, 2016

An attempt to smuggle Johnny Walker Red Label. 

Due to the high risk involved and the difficulty of moving product in high numbers, name-brand liquor comes at a cost. One diplomatic cable from 2009 released by Wikileaks put the price of a black-market bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label at $800 due to a shortage in supply. (In the United States, the whiskey would cost from $40 to $50). It’s no wonder many in the country resort to brewing their own.

As in Prohibition-era United States, this has led to the rise of modern-day speakeasies—especially behind the walls of the expatriate enclaves, where authorities mostly turn a blind-eye to illicit activity. Unlike the Prohibition-era U.S., though, which brings to mind celebrity mafiosi and blood-drenched streets, there is little evidence of high-level gangsters in Saudi Arabia operating complex networks of suppliers, smugglers, and dealers, infiltrating the police and border agency at their highest levels, or settling business differences with irrefusable offers.

At the turn of the millennium, however, things did turn briefly violent between rival factions of Saudi alcohol providers, at least according to some.

Four bombings carried out over three months in the country were linked to expatriates who, according to Saudi authorities, used radio-controlled bombs to target the cars of their competition. One British man, Christopher Rodway, died and five others were injured in the attacks. Five British expatriates, a Canadian, and a Belgian were deemed responsible and confessed to the crimes on national television. Abel al-Jubeir, the foreign affairs adviser to the Crown Prince, claimed the attackers and victims were members of “rival gangs who were involved in smuggling alcohol,” who had turned to violence to settle scores.

The accused deny the charges and have since been released. Many observers believe they were forced to confess to hide the reality: that the bombings were carried out by anti-Western extremists who were opposed to Saudi ties to the U.K. and U.S.

As for the gang behind the Grand Mufti’s stash, nobody can be sure what happened to them or their stockpile. Muhammad ibn Ibrahim’s family continues to occupy the most important religious and legal seat in the country and smugglers and bootleggers are finding new ways to to quench the thirst of the Saudi desert, each more ingenious than the last. But with the exception of the rum-runners and authorities involved, it’s hard to know if this particular tale is anything more than an urban legend.

Still, as Morris wrote: “In this country, the story could be true; it certainly should be.”

Crabbers near Astoria, Oregon recently caught footage of what appears to be a Pacific Northwest reboot of Jaws. As seen in a video shared by Oregon’s NBC affiliate KGW, a huge shark has found its way into the Columbia River to hunt down some seal meals.

The video was captured by a pair of local crab fishermen who were out on a standard crustacean hunt. When they were on the water in a small boat, the fishermen noticed a large pool of blood in the water, coming from an injured seal. While they tried to figure out what had attacked the seal, the fin and tail of a massive shark—which they assumed was a great white—erupted above the surface of the water. Judging by the bleeps in the video, the shark gave the guys in the boat a pretty good scare.

The witnesses judged the shark to be around 12-15 feet long, which would make it an average-sized great white specimen, although local wildlife experts quoted by KGW have other theories. According to a biologist from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife who took a look at the video, the shark could also be a salmon shark, a close relative of the great white. Both types of shark haunt the area’s coastal regions, but it's rarer to see them travel up into the river.

Whatever type of shark it was, it was large, and appeared hungry. Swimming season is thankfully over, but it’s a good reminder to stay out of the water anyway.

Mystery flight circles over Denver; officials have few answers: https://t.co/Yph4dDZIZF#Denver#news#Colorado

— Denver7 News (@DenverChannel) November 17, 2016

A local news organization in Denver is reporting that a white plane spent Wednesday morning circling the Denver metro area multiple times with no apparent explanation.

Denver7 called a laundry list of government agencies and couldn’t get a clear answer on what the plane was doing: “Still so far the only answer we’ve got is: I don’t know,” the news channel reported.

The plane, which had a callsign of IRON99, came from California, circled over Denver in an oval shaped like a racetrack several times, then continued on towards Oklahoma.

Denver7 wasn’t able to find out exactly who was responsible for the flight, but it’s pretty clear that the mystery plane was connected to the military. Aviation enthusiasts confidentlyidentified it as an E-6B, an airborne command post aircraft used by the Navy and Air Force.

That doesn’t explain why the plane was making this particular maneuver at this particular moment, and why the military wouldn’t just tell news reporters what was happening. Anytime you start talking about planes and Denver, suspicions of weirdness are immediately high. But it’s probably nothing to get worked up about. For now.

When you close your eyes and imagine mummies lying within pyramids, ancient Egypt is likely the first thing that comes to mind. But after visiting this strange and obscure pyramid outside the northeastern Polish village of Rapa, you might find good reason to replace that well-worn image with a new, far less familiar one.

The Rapa Pyramid was built by Friedrich Heinrich Fahrenheit (also spelled Fahrenheid), an important official and nobleman for Imperial Eastern Prussia who was also an avid art collector and world traveler. Swept up in the contemporary fascination with ancient Egypt, he became obsessed with mummification and pharaonic beliefs of the afterlife.

Whether Friedrich actually tried his hand at ancient magic is unclear, but he was certainly intrigued enough to hire Bertel Thorvaldsen (a famous Danish sculptor of the time) to erect a massive family tomb in the shape of a miniature Egyptian pyramid just 5km away from his estate. Completed in 1811, the structure has a perfect square base with sides of 10.4m, a height of 15.9m, and an internal wall angle of 51°52’, which is identical to the Egyptian pyramids at Giza.

It wasn’t long before the vault was occupied. Just three years after its completion, Friedrich’s three-year-old daughter, Ninette, passed away and was laid to rest in the mausoleum. Over time, more family members were interred in the unusual crypt, until finally Friedrich himself was entombed in 1849.

During the final stages of World War II, the Fahrenheit family fled before advancing Soviet forces. The Red Army blasted open the walls of the mausoleum and opened the graves, cutting off the heads of the mummified corpses, smashing the coffins, and leaving the site to the mercy of elements.

Paradoxically, this abandonment probably saved the monument from destruction during the Communist era, and deepened the structure’s magical intrigue. Still in perfect condition when they were desecrated (despite the prevailing swampiness of the area), the decapitated mummies refused to decompose. People came far and wide to visit and photograph the bodies.

Mystics attribute the phenomenon to powerful energy fields, created by the intersection at the site of three ley lines and amplified by the tomb’s structure. This dynamic is similarly credited with keeping mosquitos and other bugs out of the marshy area.

Over time, the locals rebuilt the monument, but left the headless bodies on display for visitors to see. In 2008, after designating the site as a historic landmark, the Polish government put the Fahrenheit mummies back into closed coffins and sealed the entrance for good. Today, visitors peering through barred windows no longer see headless mummies and Eastern Front destruction, but rather four flower-covered coffins sitting neatly inside.

Villena is a medium-sized city in the province of Alicante, and anyone driving past on the Madrid-Alicante autovía cannot help but notice the 12th-century castle towering majestically over the town. Those who divert to visit it will be offered the chance to also see a much less obvious attraction: the Treasure of Villena, a Bronze Age hoard containing some items that local tradition holds were made by God.

The Treasure of Villena is the largest Bronze Age treasure hoard ever found on the Iberian Peninsula, and the second-largest ever found in Europe (the largest being Royal Graves hoard found in Mycenae, Greece).  It consists of 59 items of various precious materials, such as gold, silver, iron, and amber. The entire hoard weighs almost 10 kg. The gold objects—which comprise about 90% of the collection—are made of  23.5 carat gold and include eleven bowls, three bottles, and 28 bracelets.

This is considered to be one of the two most important discoveries of prehistoric gold objects in Europe, with the other being the aforementioned Royal Graves collection. The iron pieces, meanwhile, are the oldest such items that have been found in the Iberian Peninsula.  It has been estimated by archaeologists that the contents of the hoard date to around 1000 BCE.

The treasure was discovered by archaeologist José Maria Soler in December 1963, in a dry river bed called the “Rambla del Panadero” about 7 miles from Villena. Somewhat curiously, the entire collections was contained inside an open–mouthed oval vessel in a hollow just two inches below the surface. There had also been a smaller hoard (called the "Little Treasure of Cabezo Redondo," and consisting of 35 pieces with a total weight of 150g) found in 1959, at a site about five miles from where the larger hoard would later be discovered. Two sets of copies of the whole treasure have been made to be shown in exhibitions all around the world.

Since its discovery, the Treasure of Villena has been the main attraction of the city’s Museum of Archaeology, which is housed on the ground floor of the (rather attractive) town hall building. The hoard is displayed in an armoured showcase at the museum. Villena’s excellent castle was built by the Moors in the 12th century and greatly extended in the 15th century, only to eventually be badly damaged (internally) by the French during the Napoleonic Wars.

The neoclassical gem that is Manchester's Portico Library collection began simply enough. Surgeon Michael Ward and his friend Robert Robinson were chatting one day around the year 1796 and felt inspired to solve the city's lack of just such an institution. What resulted from their conversation became the present-day library and gallery, open since 1806, which continues to house their original 19th-century texts.

Though renowned primarily for its wide selection of travel literature, biographies, and historical texts from this period, what helps distinguish the Portico from its peer institutions is the unusually fine selection of fiction, including a number of first editions. Alongside Dickens, Bulwer Lytton, Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell stand many lesser known authors who continue to emerge today as important subjects of study.

Housed in a building designed by Thomas Harrison, the architect renowned for his use of the classical revival style on the Liverpool Lyceum, the Portico's nearly 25,000 tomes provide a fascinating glimpse into the mindset of the city of Manchester as it entered and transformed throughout England's industrial age. 

The rarest of these books reside within in a luxe reading room fit for the era from which it hails. Sadly (but for the super reasonable sake of historic preservation), this tiny, sit-able time capsule is reserved for library members only, though the rest of the library's collection is freely accessed to all curious parties during open hours of operation. 

Located in the arid Nevada hills, the Techatticup Mine once spat out enough gold and silver to inspire murder, treachery, and claim-jumping. Now it has been restored and is partially open to visitors looking to take a tour through the rocky but, luckily, bloodless tunnels.

While the thick veins of precious metals were discovered in the hills of what is now Nelson, Nevada by Spanish explorers in the 1700s, digging did not begin in earnest until around a hundred years later in one of the largest mining booms in the state history. Hungry prospectors began to swarm the area around the mid-1800s, digging a warren of tunnels and shafts deep into the hills, following seemingly endless mineral veins into the ground. The area soon became a popular refuge for Civil War deserters who hid from battle in the remote and inhospitable desert climate.

Ownership of the mines soon became a hotly contested issue with groups of miners claim-jumping one another or simply murdering their competition. Soon the area became infamous as a lawless free-for-all where murder could be a nightly occurrence. At the peak of the criminal activity, local law enforcement refused to even enter the area.  

Eventually the boom subsided and the Techatticup Mine was abandoned leaving behind miles of tunnels and countless rickety sheds and houses. After decades of neglect the land was purchased by the Werly family who set to work restoring the historic buildings and even excavating and exploring the many tunnels. Today the Werlys themselves now offer historic tours through portions of the mines walking visitors some 500 feet into the hills over pits hundreds of feet deep, showing veins of gold and silver that still sit unmined in the rock.

The area has also been the setting of a number of films including 3000 Miles to Graceland, from which the remains of a fake exploded plane can still be seen.   

In 1689, on the canal Bloemgracht in Amsterdam there was a museum that showcased preserved anatomical specimens in a peculiar manner.

Among jars of embalmed specimens, there were several startling dioramas containing skeletons of infants adorned with delicate and morbid decor. In one of the pieces, depicted below, five skeletons are carefully positioned on a vase foundation made of inflated tissues from human testes. There was a feather headdress, a girdle of sheep intestines, and a spear made of the hardened vas deferens of an adult man.

The skeleton standing at the top of the pile of preserved human remains holds a piece of bone like a violin and a dried artery for a bow. Its head tilted towards the heavens is coupled with the inscription, “Ah Fate, ah Bitter Fate!”

The skeletal scene is from one of Dutch anatomist Frederik Ruysch’s several dioramas, or tableaux—fetal skeletons arranged in still-life positions atop a landscape of preserved plants, bones, and embalmed tissues. Ruysch’s Amsterdam museum was like a 17th-century version of the recent blockbuster exhibition, Body Worlds, by Gunther von Hagen. He treated science as an art, pushing the practice of specimen preservation while arranging his pieces to make a commentary on the beauty of life and death.

He would juxtapose the macabre contents with flowers, beads, jewels, and lace to “allay the distaste of people who are naturally inclined to be dismayed by the sight of corpses,” he once wrote. “I do it to preserve the honor and dignity of the soul once housed in the body,” Ruysch said.

Ruysch’s displays attracted medical professionals, political leaders, and the general public, receiving mixed reactions of fascination and disgust. In addition to his collection, Ruysch used notable preservation techniques, such as wax injections, to maintain the structure of blood vessels, and created a secret embalming liquor that kept specimens looking lifelike.

While he is most famous for his hauntingly beautiful dioramas, his museum also contained quality preserved specimens ranging from exotic plants, squid, and butterflies, to human embryos and brains, which were later drawn in his book Thesaurus anatomicus— or "anatomical treasures."   

Born in 1638 in The Hague, Netherlands, Ruysch grew up exposed to foreign flora and fauna that travelers would bring back to Europe to trade. He first became interested in plants and received training at an apothecary, which led him to start collecting different plants, rocks, insects, and eventually human bones. Ruysch later became a fellow at the Amsterdam Surgeon’s Guild in Anatomy, and by 1690, he was regularly dissecting, embalming, and mounting preparations.

In the late 1600s, Ruysch decided to share his anatomical works with the public, renting out a series of small houses in Amsterdam for the museum. His collection continued to grow, “and so I was forced to start a second room, and this one also being insufficient, a third,” he said.

The museum was overflowing with more than 2,000 specimens. While the anatomical collection was the centerpiece, he had two separate rooms dedicated to dried plants and “strange creatures” filled with fish, insects, and other flora and fauna from Asia, Africa, and America. When visitors entered, they were immediately greeted by a tomb of various skeletal remains—bones of children who died too young. One skull of a newborn baby bore the saying: "No head, however strong, escapes cruel death."

“Ruysch’s presentation of his anatomical collection was in keeping with a tradition in which depictions of skulls and skeletons served as reminders of death,” Luuc Kooijmans writes in the book Death Defied: The Anatomy Lessons of Frederik Ruysch.“He impressed upon his visitors that death could strike at any moment, and that they should be ready to face it with a clear conscience.”  

Ruysch ran the museum as a family operation. He would hold classes and provide information to physicians and medical professionals himself, while his daughters would give tours to the general public, who paid a small admission fee. One of his daughters, still-life artist Rachel Ruysch, even assisted with the dioramas by sewing the lace garments and tiny batiste sleeves.

Some fetal heads were given lace collars, and the blunt ends of embalmed limbs wore textiles and fabrics, writes Britta Martinez in the Embryo Project Encyclopedia. Many of the skeletons are seen holdings jewels in their boney hands or strings of pearls. Ruysch also took to decorating the lids of preservation jars—a floating human hand cradling a hatching reptile topped with seashells, dried corals, butterflies, and flowers. By mixing exquisite plant arrangements with the human specimens, Ruysch hoped to soften the sight of morbid body parts for those who found it grotesque and unsettling.

The decorations “put the horror in perspective by stressing the transience of life, by showing that the body was no more than an earthly frame for the soul,” Kooijmans explains.

However, his designs were met with some criticism. In a pamphlet published in 1677, one opponent ridiculed Ruysch’s artistic dioramas, and claimed that he couldn’t see how the displays could inform anything about anatomy:

“He paints snakes to portray his venom; he paints toads to express his poisoned nature...he paints lobsters to portray his crabbiness… he paints trees and woods to chase the officers into them; he paints flowers to learn that all his fine works perish as easily as a wildflower.”

Ruysch’s contribution to anatomy is often overshadowed by his elaborate tableaux. He spent much of his time experimenting with embalming methods that would better preserve soft body parts, which lose their color and quality over time. One technique he helped refine was the art of preserving the tiny veins, arteries, lymph vessels, and nerves that run throughout the body.

In 1697, he successfully injected a wax-like fluid that was thin enough to seep into the smallest branching capillaries. The fluid would then solidify, preserving the shape and structure.

“All those arterial vessels fanning out into the internal organs and going straight into the veins,” Ruysch marveled.  

This technique would be performed on deceased humans and animals to better visualize vessels and blood flow. Ruysch applied the injection on the cerebral cortex, which helped others understand its structure, writes Sidney Ochs in A History of Nerve Functions: From Animal Spirits to Molecular Mechanisms.

Physicians also praised Ruysch for the lifelike color and elasticity of his specimens. He achieved this greater quality through another liquid invention he called “liquor balsamicum,” a clear embalming liquid that took him 34 years to perfect. It made the specimens “as hard as stone and imperishable, but changed them a great deal in color and shape,” Ruysch wrote.  

Ruysch never divulged the recipe of liquor balsamicum. After his death in 1731, at the age of 92, various chemists attempted to reproduce it but the results were unimpressive. In a book published in 2006, his secret liquor balsamicum has been revealed to contain clotted pig’s blood, Berlin blue, and mercury oxide, according to Erich Brenner in the Journal of Anatomy. 

In 1717, Ruysch sold his anatomy museum (and secret liquor recipe) to Tsar Peter the Great, who had been an avid patron and fan of his work. His pieces still exist in the Kunstkammer of Peter the Great in Leningrad Academy of Science, and are immortalized in the illustrations of Thesaurus anatomicus.

Ruysch’s fetal tableaux are bizarre, but he believed that they served a scientific purpose, writes Antonie Luyendijk-Elshout. Ruysch firmly stated that he could bring a dead person back to life through his embalming practices, as if “almost nothing is missing but the soul.”

Just off the road in the town of Rome, New York, a unique relic of World War II can be found: A 10-foot-tall concrete Alley Oop statue. In the 1940s, the statue had been a mascot for Griffiss Airforce base, and was subsequently lost and found again a few times over the years, eventually relocated to the side of the road.

The shirtless American GI is wearing a helmet and was once holding a machine gun, which has since gone missing.  For a long time it was covered in weeds and decorated with graffiti. The last time it was found, people reclaimed the concrete man and moved to its current location. It has now taken a place among other pieces of art work on the Griffiss International Sculpture Garden.

In 1890, the Haynes Copper Company sunk a 1200-foot shaft into the middle of one of the richest copper deposits ever discovered. Much to their chagrin, they found no copper. Luckily, they struck gold instead, creating the small boom town of Haynes, the remnants of which are today an intriguing mix of ghost town and mechanical hobbyist's paradise.

While the Gold King Mine Ghost Town boasts a disused mine shaft and antiquated buildings, owner/proprietor Don Robertson is both the source of and a large part of the main attraction. A tinkerer with a knack and an enthusiasm for all things mechanical, Don purchased the site of the abandoned town of Haynes and has turned it into his own gearhead paradise.

The attractions assembled and lovingly cared for by Don Robertson include antique mine equipment still cranking away, as well as a turn-of-the-century sawmill still actively filling orders, a circa 1901 blacksmith shop, classic gas engines, and a wide array of restored antique cars, including vintage trucks and race cars. The open-air museum also features resident animals—including donkeys, rabbits, goats, and chickens—looking for treats and scratches from visitors.

Memories of Paintings from Thomas Blanchard on Vimeo.

We know what you’re thinking: “four and a half minutes of paint moving?” but trust us, once you start watching, you'll stop noticing the passage of time.

This video, directed by Thomas Blanchard, is a symphony of colors. Titled Memories of Paint, it holds you in a trance as the slow motions of the substance rock back and forth, forming shapes that evoke arctic landscapes or star clusters.

The project was inspired by the work of Russian artist Rus Khasanov, and uses paint, oil, oat milk, and soap liquid to achieve its hypnotizing effect.

Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

If you were to walk the streets of Bogotá at 8:00pm in 1994, you would have been confronted by a strange sight. The city, which at most other times is a constant bustle of traffic jams, street vendors, buses, and pedestrians, would be relatively quiet, almost at a standstill. Foreigners might be confused, but locals knew the reason, most likely because they were partaking in it themselves. The cause? A soap opera called Café, con aroma de mujer (Coffee, With the Scent of a Woman). 

Now, soap operas in Latin America come and go. Some achieve wild success, some get lost in the jumble of television channels that constantly churn out novelas like very well-oiled machines. Few, however, have ever reached the status of Café, as Colombians affectionately refer to it. The soap is the second most-watched program in the country, right behind Ugly Betty, which in 2010 was declared by the Guinness Book of World Records as the most successful soap opera of all time (both soap operas were written by the now-acclaimed Fernando Gaitan).

Given its success, it is strange to think that the premise of Café is fairly simple, and somewhat predictable: A poor young woman nicknamed Gaviota travels around looking for work at coffee plantations. At one such plantation, she meets Sebastian, the rich and handsome heir of a well-to-do family. Of course, they fall madly in love. Villains, misunderstandings, and tragedies separate them, but in the end (spoiler alert) their love wins and they get married.  

Such a premise has been endlessly repeated in soap operas. Yet this time, the story didn’t just enjoy popularity, it quite literally changed the daily life of Colombians. As Alejandro Jose Lopez Caceres explains in his book, Between the Pen and the Screen: Reflections on Literature, Film, and Journalism:

The streets and avenues of the main cities of the country turned ghostly at 8 p.m., the time of emission, for a moment,  in the halls of the Senate, the arguments weren’t between liberals vs. conservatives, but between supporters of Dr. Salinas vs. supporters of Sebastian; the President gave his opinion on what the best ending was for Gaviota; congressional sessions ended sooner and several debates had to be put off until morning [...] the same happened in bars, in neighborhoods, in universities, in brothels.”

In their daily lives, people took the same approach as congress seemed to have taken: whatever it was, it could wait until after Café. Or, as Cristobal Errazuriz, who played the story’s main villain, explained in a TV special dedicated to the soap:

You couldn’t call any house after 8 p.m. because they would insult you. “Ah, we’re watching Café!” It was a phenomenon, they played it on the buses. While it was being aired, the buses would play its audio, so that the people who couldn’t get home could listen to it while on the bus.

Those on cars and motorcycles would often carry a portable TV with them, so they could watch it while driving home. Hang outs, appointments, and other rendezvous had to be scheduled around the sacred time.

If Café’s importance continues to be doubted, one need only look at this entry in one Colombian history textbook's chronology: 

1993: The soap opera Coffee, With the Scent of a Woman is aired. Law 100 established universal social security. Pablo Escobar dies in Medellin at the hands of the police.

Café, in other words, ranks alongside universal social security, and the death of Colombia’s most feared terrorist and drug kingpin. 

But why would an entire country forego policy making, meetings with friends, and road safety for a soap opera with a seemingly unoriginal plot? The answer, or part of it, lies in the title.

Coffee has been one of Colombia’s main exports since the beginning of the 20th century. It is a source of livelihood for many, and a source of pride for all. In the beginning of the 1990s, coffee was a especially sensitive topic. The country’s golden era of exportation had been abruptly cut short with the end of the International Coffee Pact in 1989. With new competition and unregulated prices, the product’s value was no longer stable, and Colombia suffered because of it.

This suffering was monetary, of course, but also moral. Colombia’s coffee-growing axis is in many ways its heartland, and coffee is one of the products that the country is proud of exporting. In the mists of the armed conflict and the height of cartel problems, this was even truer. As Lopez Caceres references when talking about Café,

In several countries around the world, in Latin America as well as in Europe, for many months the name of Colombia was not associated with cocaine but with Coffee, With the Scent of a Woman.

A 1995 article in El Tiempo claims that the success of the soap opera “resides in its being a faithful reflection of contemporary Colombian life.” Its depiction of life both in the coffee region and the capital, of corruption, of the realities of class divisions in the only country in the world that quantifies social class, and, according to the article, of the constantly frustrated dreams of a better life, brought it close to the hearts of Colombian. By following the strong-willed Gaviota's struggle through the corruption and classism of an industry so intrinsically tied to the national identity, the entire country saw itself represented on screen. 

At the same time, as Marco Palacios and Frank Safford say in Colombia: Fragmented Country, Divided Society, the script “suppressed the devastation of extortion, rampant crime, and kidnapping to which Colombian families have been exposed.” 

The soap opera, in other words, had the ability to both bring Colombians closer to the center of their reality, while simultaneously letting them escape from it.