It'’s almost impossible to find one of Britain’s secret, underground military bases unless you know what to look for. In the years since they were built, starting in 1940, many of them have collapsed or fallen into disrepair, but to begin with they were meant to be hard to find—unless you knew they were there. Today, even though they’re no longer camouflaged, they still guard their secrets. To the untrained eye, the entrance might look like a random hole in the ground.
During World War II, the British Army built more than 600 of these underground bunkers—possibly upwards of 1,000—to serve as bases for small groups of fighters who’d be mobilized in the event of a German invasion. These local Auxiliary Units weren’t meant to last more than a few weeks: they might slow the Nazi army down, but they’d likely die fulfilling that mission.
The bases weren’t meant to last, either. After the war, they were supposed to be destroyed, but many were not. One of the only reasons they’re known at all is that historians, enthusiasts, and veteran Auxiliaries has been documenting the history of these covert units and seeking out the remains of their secret underground bases—when they can find them. The locations of the extant bases aren't revealed to the public, but it is possible to visit a replica, at Coleshill House.
Every year, from mid-November to mid-January, a most extraordinary train yard is erected inside the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory at the New York Botanical Gardens in the Bronx.
Artist Paul Busse and his team at Applied Imagination in Kentucky have been responsible for creating buildings, bridges, gardens and a Coney Island boardwalk–all in model train G-scale–since the exhibit began in 1991. Every structure is a replica of an actual New York place (some old, some still with us), and the annual tradition is now over 150 landmarks strong.
The twist is that everything is made out of organic materials. Nuts, seeds, leaves, fungus and branches are all used to create the miniatures, down to the tiniest of cherubs above a doorway. They even use tree resin for window glass.
The 2016 show (Holiday Train Show number 25) includes almost half a mile of track zipping through the city scenes. If you ramped that up from G-scale, it would be over 11 miles of real life clickety-clack.
New fossil research has revealed the existence of a strange little dinosaur that was born with teeth, but shed them to grow an adult beak.
According to The Verge, these unique beasts are the first reptiles ever discovered that underwent such a drastic dental metamorphosis. Called the Limusaurus inextricabilis (“inextricable mud lizard”), the dinosaur was a bipedal relative of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, but much smaller, only standing thigh-high to a modern human.
The process (a form of extreme ontogenetic variation) is thought to have developed to allow the little guys to change their diet as they matured. A young limusaurus would have rows of teeth that allowed it to survive on a more omnivorous diet while young, but move into an increasingly herbivorous diet as they got older, so as to avoid competing with other omnivores.
While the newly discovered change may be unique to the Limusaurus inextricabilis, according to a vertebrate expert quoted in Science Magazine, there may be many more such species that go through a similar transformation, we just haven’t found their skulls yet. The mature beak could lead researchers to a better understanding of how beaks developed and how modern birds sprung up from their saurian roots.
It’s the moment every member of the audience has been waiting for. The black swan comes out, looks to the horizon with a defiant smile, and begins to turn round and round and round in a hypnotizing sequence that twirls you right into the climax of the story.
The role of princess Odette and the enchantress Odile (usually danced by the same ballerina) in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake is one of the most coveted roles in ballet. Not only is the story beautiful and the ballet timeless, but the roles have some of the most challenging moves in dance, including the legendary 32 fouettés.
Literally meaning “whipped” or “whisked,” the move is comprised of 32 consecutive turns on one pointed foot. If it sounds impossible, it’s because it almost is. So much so, that this video has been made to explain the physics of it. It turns out, it’s all about momentum, velocity, inertia, and gravity.
Of course, you knew this, but seeing it broken down and illustrated is something else.
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.
Cold War tensions escalated on August 12, 1961 when Communist soldiers sealed off West Berlin with barbed wire barricades. In Washington, D.C., construction of a different sort was also underway that day, as the White House Signal Agency moved forward with a top-secret communications facility in Tenleytown.
When it was completed, this unassuming brick tower concealed a radar dish that linked Washington via microwave relay with the Mid-Atlantic “federal relocation arc.” In the event of a missile exchange, the tower—codenamed Cartwheel—would function as the central spoke connecting whatever remained of the continuity of government system.
It’s located in Fort Reno, a public park in a quiet suburban neighborhood. The spot may seem odd for a classified military project. It was selected because of Reno’s elevation, which is the highest in the city, and because the 100-foot-tall tower could blend in amongst the two preexisting water towers.
Elevation is key because the microwave relay employed line-of-sight technology; the radar dishes at each relay literally had to be able to “see” one another. A network of similar towers were spaced out roughly 50 miles apart and allowed the signals to jump from Washington all the way to facilities in Pennsylvania.
The facade of the top section of the Fort Reno tower is painted Plexiglas that conceals the Cartwheel radar dish. A crew lived and worked in the tower 24 hours a day. A two-story bunker underneath housed the electrical generators and food stocks that would supposedly see the crew through World War III.
Of course, the whole thing was a little ridiculous. Early civil defense concepts were based on outdated World War II-era notions of air power, where an attack might constitute a single (relatively low yield) atomic bomb. By 1960, both the Soviet Union and the United States had developed intercontinental missiles that could carry vastly more powerful thermonuclear weapons. In the event of war, several of these weapons may have been fired at Washington.
In the 1970s Cartwheel was deemed obsolete and transferred to the Federal Aviation Administration, who found a civilian use for the communications tower. It is still in use.
Greyhound began as an intercity bus line in Minnesota. Its founder, Carl Eric Wickman, would transport miners the two miles from Hibbing to neighboring town of Alice (which had more bars) in his seven seat Hupmobile. The business expanded fast, meeting the needs of an ever more interconnected America.
The name "Greyhound" apparently came from Wickman's sighting of his bus' reflection in the glass window of a storefront. The sleek gray reflection zooming by reminded him of a racing dog speeding down the track. That sleek image became one of the best known brands in the U.S.
The buses themselves took on a new meaning in 1961, becoming a symbol of the Civil Rights movement when a bus carrying Freedom Riders was firebombed in Alabama. Images of the gutted bus were representative of the violence committed against black protesters by hate groups.
The Greyhound Bus Museum, however, came not from the Greyhound company but from one man who stumbled upon the abandoned bus station in Hibbing, the birthplace of Greyhound. Colorful and "Streamline Moderne" in style, the old station has been repurposed as a museum dedicated to the history of Greyhound Lines. Gene Nicolelli, a Hibbing resident, knew the place had significance to his town and wanted to commemorate it. It took nearly 20 years to get funding from the state, but by then Nicolelli had a wealth of Greyhound memorabilia. There are badges, uniforms, awards (like the 1961 Gold Steering Wheel for Safe Driving) and of course, buses.
Don’t worry; none of Atlas Obscura’s most popular stories of 2016 had to do with the U.S. presidential election. Of course, we did write about the never-ending race, but more often than not our readers elected to visit our website for escapism and counter-programming.
You gravitated towards secret histories and linguistic mysteries, stories delving into hidden aspects of cities, the scientific world, the historical record, and the odder corners of the internet. These articles spanned the globe, from Chernobyl to Canada, the Marshall Islands to Mexico. Yet the majority of our top stories illuminated discoveries and events in the United States, where a large share of our readers live. Our most-read article of the year was set in the New York Public Library, just across the East River from the Atlas Obscura office in Brooklyn.
Here are the 25 most popular stories that we published this year.
Christianity took shape with the support of female leaders and mystics and activists. But what we have left of them now are only the remembrances of a handful of men.
In terms of visual design, the cards are simple: Five different shapes—a five-pointed star, a circle, a square, a cross, and three wavy lines—printed in black on a white background, with an abstract blue pattern on the back like you’d find on a regular deck of cards. But what the cards are designed to do is a bit more complicated. They’re intended to test something that half of Americans believe in and most of the scientific community says doesn’t exist at all: extrasensory perception, or ESP.
Since the 1930s, Zener cards, also known as ESP cards, have been used to quantify psychic ability, testing for telepathy and clairvoyance (you might remember them from that scene in 1984’s Ghostbusters, when Venkman tests the “effects of negative reinforcement on ESP”). The cards straddle the intersection of science and the paranormal, pseudoscience and legitimacy. In a lot of ways, that’s a space also occupied by the man who pioneered their use, Dr. Joseph B. Rhine, founder of the Duke Parapsychology Lab.
Rhine’s interest in the paranormal took hold in 1922, when he was a young plant physiologist earning a Ph.D. in botany at the University of Chicago. Rhine and his wife Louisa were both dedicated scientists, but they had questions that simple biological reductionism didn’t seem to answer; Rhine had once thought of joining the ministry, until his wife steered him towards science. And then, in May of that year, they sat in the audience to hear Sir Arthur Conan Doyle make his case for life after death.
Doyle, best known for creating hyper-rational detective Sherlock Holmes, had been an avowed Spiritualist since 1916; he believed that spirit communication via mediums could offer scientific proof of a spiritual beyond. His 1922 lecture tour of America was a kind of Spiritualist mission, spreading the good news that the veil separating the bereaved living from the beloved dead was thin and easily broached by psychic perception. This message resonated with an American public still aching from the devastations of the Great War.
“I stand but ankle deep in a vast ocean of psychic knowledge, but even if I am only ankle deep, I can perhaps bring some message to those who stand dry shod on the shores,” Doyle told an enraptured audience, according to a contemporary Associated Press report. “This mere possibility was the most exhilarating thought I had had in years,” Joseph Rhine reportedly wrote later.
It wasn’t Spiritualism itself that attracted the Rhines, but rather the idea that science could examine the kinds of answers Spiritualism offered. “Both of my parents as a couple were searching for answers to the Big Questions of Life, perhaps typical of their era, when encountering scientific thinking in college disrupted the religious beliefs of their youth,” Dr. Sally Rhine Feather, the Rhines’ oldest daughter and herself a clinical psychologist, told me by email. Feather described her parents as “serious young people from fairly simple farm backgrounds in the Midwest,” each of them the first in their families to pursue any advanced education. Science had replaced religion for them, but it wasn’t enough. They wanted to use science to study the kinds of experiences that had, until recently, been the province of religion alone.
After graduating in 1925, Rhine took a job teaching botany at West Virginia University, but his true passion remained with these big questions. He and Louisa soon “began extracurricular study of psychical research material,” Feather said. In 1926, the opportunity arose to study under Dr. William McDougall, a psychologist interested in what was then called “psychical research,” during his sabbatical from Harvard University. Rhine and Louisa leapt at it: They resigned their teaching positions, sold all of their furniture, and moved to Boston.
“They decided to just abandon careers in plant physiology to see if they could find scientific evidence for the afterlife,” said Feather. One of the first places they looked was in the dark, stuffy parlor room of Mina Crandon, a prominent medium who often performed séances clad in only a dressing gown and stockings. The Rhines found her performance risible. As Stacy Horn recounted in her fascinating book, Unbelievable: Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy, and Other Unseen Phenomena, from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory, the Rhines published their account of Crandon’s fakery in 1927 in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, making “an argument that would be turned against them for the rest of their lives”: “If we can never know to a relative certainty that there was no trickery possible, no inconsistencies present, and no normal action occurring, we can never have a science and never really know anything about psychic phenomena.”
What Rhine wanted was proof—verifiable, scientific, replicable proof. But this put him in a kind of no man’s land. He was too skeptical to be a glassy-eyed believer, willing to mistake goose fat-covered cheesecloth for ectoplasm, but not so skeptical that he dismissed the entire possibility of psychic phenomena. At the same time, religion had no use for his work and may even have seen it as a threat; Horn noted that if Rhine’s work was successful, it might offer up alternative explanations for phenomena previously considered miraculous. “If you look at it, both sides were rooting against him,” she said in a recent phone conversation.
What Rhine did have going for him, however, was sheer force of character. Passionate about his research, led by his understanding of scientific method, and supported by his wife and partner who believed in his work just as strongly as he did, Rhine was ideally suited to drag psychic phenomenon away from the tipping tables and Ouija board and into the world of science.
In 1927, McDougall, Rhine’s mentor in psychology and psychical research, moved to Duke University; the Rhines soon followed. Rhine taught psychology as an instructor, but the bulk of their work in the first few months was devoted to analyzing the copious records of a man called John Thomas, who had compiled 750 pages of notes on conversations he had with his late wife via spirit mediums. Rhine satisfied himself that the mediums referred to information about Thomas and his wife that they could not have accessed through conventional means. But, he noted, that didn’t mean the information was actually coming from the deceased – it could just as easily be coming from Thomas’s mind.
This, to Rhine, was a much more plausible avenue for research: the ability of the human mind to gain information outside of basic limiting principles such as time, space, and physics. These abilities, which he was convinced existed, he termed “extra-sensory perception.” He did that, he wrote at the time, “in order to make it sound as normal as may be.”
Rhine abandoned the search for proof of survival after death and instead began to focus on ESP. His first efforts at testing telepathy were informal: He used a numbered card or a normal playing card to see whether subjects—regular people, usually students, and not mediums or people who had built a reputation as being psychic—could guess the card without seeing it. What he found, however, was that people tended to have favorite cards, and would suggest those rather than try to really guess what card was being help up. Rhine wanted an entirely new set of cards, featuring images that had no previous associations in the minds of his subjects. For this, he turned to his colleague in the psychology department, psychologist Dr. Karl Zener.
Zener, whose usual work focused on conditioned responses (think Pavlov’s dogs), selected the five simple symbols—the star, the square, the circle, three wavy lines, and the cross—because people didn’t seem to have a bias towards any one. The Zener deck came with five sets of the five symbols, meaning that the chances of guessing the first card correctly was one in five, but the chances of making 10 or more correct guesses in a run of 25 cards was about one in 20.
“Nothing magical about the method, but it was simple, could hold attention, subject to evaluation, etc.—a paradigm for how ESP could be tested,” explained Feather. Feather, who was born in 1930, grew up at Duke with her father’s work. She remembers her mother using the Zener cards to test neighborhood children around the kitchen table in their Durham home.
The tests were fun and popular with the Duke students, so they had no shortage of subjects; in 1931 alone, Rhine conducted 10,000 ESP tests with 63 students, many of whom he found scored better than chance. Some scored so well above chance so as to be statistically significant, including Duke divinity graduate student Hubert Pearce—who once made 25 consecutive correct guesses, a full run of the Zener deck. Meanwhile, Rhine had begun to gather a team of graduates and undergraduates who were intrigued by his work. Feather recalled a palpable energy among the new parapsychology researchers; when they got a remarkable result “they’d be running in and out and jumping up and down… They were just excited about what they were doing.”
In May 1934, Rhine published Extra-sensory Perception, a book analyzing his by then 90,000 ESP trials. According to his 1981 obituary in the American Journal of Psychology, the book created “both a popular and professional stir. The popular reaction was largely uncritical and approving; the professional one was the opposite.” By the following year, Rhine’s work saw a massive boost when a wealthy patron gave him and his lab $10,000 a year for two years, with the possibility of extending that to $10,000 a year for five years if all went well. With the money, Rhine set up his own lab, still under the Duke auspices but separate from the psychology department. Thanks to his donor, the lab the most well-funded in the university—his budget was one-tenth of the entire Duke budget, Horn reported in her book.
That Rhine was able to conduct this kind of research, and be so well supported in it, had a lot to do with when and where he was doing it. For one thing, Duke was a new university and was, as Feather suggested, more open to exploring new, unestablished science. And secondly, though most contemporary scientists were not interested in Rhine’s research, some big names were. People like William James, Thomas Edison, and Sigmund Freud all entertained some degree of fascination with the paranormal, although some were less open about it than others.
Einstein’s discoveries, Horn noted, had cracked open a realm of unseen possibilities and scientists at this time were less closed to explanations that seem to defy basic limiting principles and established physical laws. Most of mainstream science was still hostile to the study of parapsychology—Horn described much of Rhine’s correspondence from other scientists as “vicious and nasty.” But in some ways, the scientific community had never been more open to the idea that Rhine’s research could be valuable.
Meanwhile, the general public’s appetite for ESP research was seemingly limitless. By 1937, you could buy Zener cards from the local newsstand for 10 cents a pack. Rhine’s new book New Frontiers of the Mind was chosen as a Book of the Month Club selection, ESP experiments became the subject of radio shows, and everyone wanted to talk about telepathy. “The average American was more open to his results than the average scientist,” Horn said.
Rhine’s reputation as the country’s preeminent parapsychologist meant that people who’d had weird, inexplicable experiences or felt that they had abilities that others did not thought of him as their champion—a scientist who was, to paraphrase Ghostbusters, ready to believe them. “Every time something strange would happen, people would write the lab. It was the only game in town—the letters are like a 30-year history of everything weird happening in America,” said Horn.
But popular acceptance and the tentative embrace of established science were not enough to cement parapsychology as an “acceptable” discipline. Despite the initial promise of the lab, and the hundreds of thousands of trials that Rhine and others believed established the validity of ESP, parapsychology still had the taint of occult. The distance between Rhine and established science grew. Zener, who spent the rest of his career at Duke as a perceptual psychologist and later became chair of the department, asked that the cards no longer be called “Zener cards,” because he no longer wanted to be associated with Rhine’s ESP research (it didn’t entirely work—though the Lab made an effort to call them “ESP cards,” the popular audience that had adopted the cards tended to stick with the original name). McDougall, Rhine’s champion and mentor, and William Preston Few, the Duke president who agreed to Rhine’s lab, had both died; the Parapsychology Lab was funded from outside sources (including the Office of Naval Research, the Army, and the Rockefeller Foundation), but its lack of support within the university still put it in jeopardy. In 1948, the Lab became a non-teaching independent unit within the University, losing its access to graduate students and further distancing itself from the school.
When Rhine retired in 1965, the lab closed. He founded a nonprofit research center, the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, to continue the research, and continued to be involved in ESP research until his death in 1980. The Rhine Research Center still exists, in a tidy red-brick office park in Durham; it still uses (and sells, via the website) Zener cards. Its mission remains to explore the “frontiers of consciousness and exceptional human experiences in the context of unusual and unexplained phenomena,” although there is somewhat less funding available to conduct that exploration than in the past. “In recent years, there is more work on bioenergy work, macro-PK including occasional field investigations of such, qualitative studies of case material,” Feather, who is on the Board of Directors of the Center, wrote in an email. The question that sparked Rhine’s initial interest in psi phenomena—does consciousness survive after death?—is not among the Rhine Center’s research topics: “The Rhine has enough of a job with the topics we started with,” said Feather.
Despite the Center’s continued work, it’s not clear exactly what Rhine’s legacy will be. “I think he brought legitimacy to the murky world of the paranormal by setting standards for a new experimental science,” Feather wrote in an email. “He created a standard method so that hundreds of replications were possible here and elsewhere, a standard vocabulary, a professional peer-reviewed journal (1937 to present), a graduate training program, and ultimately an international organization. He used the same techniques found in professional psychology of his day, much improved now.” His AJP obituary lauded him for establishing a middle ground between science and psi, in which real research could continue.
Horn, however, says it’s a bit more complicated. If you accept that psi ability is scientifically valid, then Rhine’s lab was never able to answer the one question it needed to: how psi abilities worked. “Without the ability to control and enhance them, which was probably the military’s interest, funding starts to dry up,” said Horn, calling the mechanism of psi the lab’s “Holy Grail.” And if you don’t accept that psi ability has any basis in science, then it’s a different picture all together: “I think he’s always a tragic figure, because for all that he did to refine the controls and analyze his results, he did not get the respect that he deserved,” Horn said.
Today, what seems most remarkable is that Rhine was able to establish a paranormal research center at all. To suggest that this research is on the fringes of the established scientific community would be an understatement: The National Science Foundation, in its surveys on public perception of science, refers to ESP and psychic ability as “pseudoscience.” The official case for the existence of “real” ESP or psi abilities is considered tenuous; attempts to replicate studies that seem to prove psi have not been consistently successful. “Parapsychology doesn’t pay well, carries a stigma, and it’s not wise for a young person to risk this as a career path,” Feather acknowledged.
But Horn, and certainly Feather and her father, might say scientists are not giving psi a fair shake. “So many [scientists] that I talked to were all, ‘This all junk science, period, end of story,’ and they actually don’t study the work,” said Horn. “I am somewhat sympathetic with that because there is a lot of junk science out there, but you’re certainly not going to win hearts and minds by belittling people… I’m skeptical, but I researched [the Rhines’] experiments and found that all the reasons that people used to discount them were not valid. I’m kind of like Rhine, ‘Okay, these are interesting effects, but we can’t explain them, but nonetheless they’re real.’ You would think you would want to find out.” With few exceptions, she said, no one she talked to in researching her book seemed interested in finding out. “That doesn’t mean anything necessarily paranormal is going on, but something is going on, why not look into it? There is so much going on in the physical world that we don’t understand, this might give us a clue.”
Still, just as it was in Rhine’s day, even if established science dismisses ESP and psi, the general public remains fascinated by it. A 2011 YouGov poll found that 48 percent of Americans believe in ESP, more than believe in ghosts or reincarnation. And, just as you could in 1937, you can buy your own pack of Zener cards, thought for considerably more than 10 cents. However much on the fringe parapsychology is, it looks like it will always have a home.
Black velvet requires darkness. In sunlight, it fades.
The dark of Northern Canada is unlike any other dark in the world. The deep darkness—“noon-moon” as it’s called—lasts for months, yet the black skies often dance with the psychedelic projections of the Aurora Borealis, a natural laser light show of green and pink and purple and blue that is a result of electrically charged sun particles caught in the magnetic grasp of the North Pole.
In the late 1970s and early ‘80s, an unlikely trend took root in these frostbitten tundras. Black velvet painting—those kitschy relics of a bygone age; a staple of tiki dives, bad motels, and pot-tinged dorm rooms—became popular in the area’s remote Inuit communities, particularly in the Yukon and Nunavut territories. The story of how these paintings arrived in these Arctic communities was even more unlikely, one by way of Palestine, and the Tex-Mex border.
In the 1960s, a successful grocery store owner by the name of Doyle Harden discovered velvets, and later began to mass produce them. He built a massive black velvet factory named Chico Arts right on the border of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez that, at its height, was capable of pumping out around 10,000 Velvet Elvis’, nude pinup girls, and Dogs Playing Poker every single day. Harden was a shrewd and practical businessman—a man who once cited“compound interest” as the eighth wonder of the world. In less than a decade, he emerged as a kind of Willy Wonka-esque figure.
Thanks to Harden, Juárez in the ‘70s was to velvet painting as Montmartre was to Impressionism, or the San Fernando Valley was to the Golden Age of Porn. To some, it was a new kind of Gold Rush—or, perhaps, more accurately, a Velvet Rush.
Meanwhile, about 2,000 miles north, in a Canadian province whose namesake—princess Louise Caroline Alberta—was herself renowned for painting, a group of Palestinian salesmen set out to “develop and dominate the Canadian velvet market.” Icy Canada may have seemed an improbable destination for entrepreneurs from the Middle East, yet due to a welcoming stance on immigration and its jobs and connections to the Mid-East Oil Company (Alberta being the heart of the Canadian oil industry), the country experienced a small uptick of Arab immigrants in the years directly following the Six-Day War, particularly in Edmonton where to this day exists a vibrant Palestinian community.
The Palestinians were determined salesmen. According to Harden—who accompanied a number of the expeditions—the salesmen would strap velvets onto their backs and sell them door-to-door. When that proved successful, writes Sam Quinones in his indispensable book Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream, they expanded. They bought a van and drove from town to town across the provinces selling the paintings whenever, wherever they could. After that, they took to the skies. They had a new, untapped market: the Inuit.
To maximize profits, the salesmen tied as many paintings as they could to their planes. The planes then, covered in enough velvet to costume a lifetime of sad lounge singers, would take off from Edmonton’s City Centre Airport and fly from village to village trying to find Inuit communities to sell their paintings. As Harden recalls:
“You’d get to a large lake. On the shores would be a village. The plane would circle. They’d land it on the water…the people come to you. The dogs come out barking, and the kids come out to see who you are.”
The trips were a success. The Palestinians were often able to sell hundreds of paintings in a single visit. The Inuit were eager to pay top-dollar for these lovable, tacky odes to offbeat Americana. On the flip side, Inuit portraiture began to find its way into black velvet’s ever-broadening catalog, and faint traces of its influence could be found in Inuit art, such as the work of Alaskan born Robert Mayokok. Or, perhaps, Arctic Elvis.
The Palestinians' arrival came at a pivotal inflection point in modern Inuit history. Many Inuit villages were changing quickly. The traditional—some of which had been largely unchanged for thousands of years—was being replaced with the new. Residents of Povungnituk, for example, in the Nunavik region of the Nord-du-Québec, were trading in their igloos and dogsleds for prefab homes and snowmobiles.
The populist, throw-away appeal of velvet cannot be understated. This wasn’t a medium that was meant to last. Velvets were cheap thrills, to be taken in like a cigarette, and then forgotten. Paintings that“belong in a gin mill, not a museum,” once quipped Edgar Leeteg, widely considered to be the father of American velvet painting, a gonzo ex-cowboy who sold his first velvet for a sandwich, and whose sleazy exploits in booze, bikes, and brawls would have given the members of Mötley Crüe a run for their money.
It’s no coincidence that multicultural melting pots, border towns, and immigrant communities were at the center of black velvet’s cultural and commercial proliferation—bought and sold by the politically, culturally, and socially dispossessed. The savvy Palestinians invested their earnings, and moved on to larger ventures.
The art form's most permanent legacy might be in the courtroom cases it inspired. The signature Velvet Elvis painting, known as “Velvis”, initiated a copyright war that Harden fought and lost, and later, according to the Dallas Observer, Elvis’ Estate filed over 50 lawsuits to try and rid the country of every last one. Chico Arts pivoted further into truck stop ephemera—cheap Native American themed knickknacks that many of its staff found offensive; they later took legal action against Harden for cultural misrepresentation. Eventually, Harden sold Chico off. Black velvet production slowed worldwide. Soon after, it mostly disappeared.
If any velvets remain from the Palestinians' trips they’re likely scattered, hidden in junk shops, or tucked away in someone’s garage—sold, as always, to make a quick, cheap buck. “Bought for $3 and sold for $25,” said one vendor, selling velvet paintings of Inuit girls online. Did these paintings have a connection to those sales trips? Had these girls once seen velvet planes appear in the sky above their villages? We’ll likely never know.
The vendor went on to say he’d bought them from a collector, but he didn’t know exactly where they were from. All she’d said was that she found them in Canada. “That distinction,” he said, “may make a difference.”
After listening all day to relentless warnings of “severe winter weather” and poring over equipment manuals to determine the lowest operating temperature for various pieces of photographic gear, I decided to stick with the plan. A few hours and several miles of snowshoeing later, I was hard at work in the diminishing February twilight, setting up lines of strobes and high-speed cameras along gaps in the tree canopy that framed a forest lake at the edge of Montana’s Bob Marshall Wilderness. I knew this lakeshore to be a primary movement corridor for a resident female northern flying squirrel (Glaucomys sabrinus), and based on observations from previous nights, I expected my nocturnal subject to launch herself across the lake sometime between 2:20 and 2:50 a.m.
By that time, the temperature was expected to be in the neighborhood of minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit, greatly increasing the chances of camera failure. But it was a risk I was willing to take, since I knew how spectacular that night’s acrobatics were likely to be. February marks the start of the northern flying squirrel’s mating season in Montana. On a typical night during this period, each female will be escorted through the forest by a squabbling squadron of ardent males. It was those energetic males and their dizzying aerial mating chases that I sought to film.
Until recently, flying squirrels were assumed to be passive gliders, using their expansive patagium—the furry wing membrane that spans from the squirrel’s neck to its forelimbs and back to its hind limbs—to simply prolong jumps across canopy gaps, and to lessen impacts upon landing. During passive gliding, travel occurs along a declining linear path. This is what paper airplanes do, trading height for horizontal distance. Although gliding like this is the cheapest form of locomotion, it is also the least stable, because any change in posture, wing symmetry, or weight distribution has the potential to disrupt the glide and result in an uncontrollable fall. Imagine a paper airplane with the sudden addition of a heavy weight on one side, or with one wing that suddenly changes size or shape.
Once scientists began studying flying squirrels in the lab, it didn’t take long to discover that there is nothing passive or constant about the species’ flight. Researchers would ultimately document in flying squirrels a wider variety of aerodynamic modifications and flight types than had been described in any other species of animal glider. In a single flight episode, a flying squirrel might use a dozen separate flight-control techniques and—frustratingly for the graduate students and research assistants tasked with documenting the patterns—different squirrels would use different combinations of these techniques. Ironically, the one type of flight that has never been observed in this species is passive gliding.
As more and more squirrels flew through wind tunnels and along blocked-off biology department corridors, it became clear that flying squirrels have a marked disregard for basic aerodynamic constraints. For example, the squirrels were frequently recorded moving through the air with extraordinarily high “angles of attack,” which is the angle between the wing—in this case the patagium—and the direction of oncoming airflow. Aircraft typically stall when their angle of attack reaches 15 to 20 degrees. Flying squirrels routinely reach 60 degrees, far exceeding values that would result in the stall and crash of even the most advanced military jets. Stalling is caused by a loss of lift. This occurs when the main source of lift, air vortices—the swirls of air that form at the leading edge of a wing as a result of differences in the pressure below and above the wing—essentially slide down the wing surface at high angles. Except, evidently, when the wing belongs to a flying squirrel.
Another lab research finding that challenged the basic aerodynamics of gliding was the flying squirrel’s ability to carry heavy objects in flight without compromising height or trajectory. In the lab, the squirrels are routinely observed generating lift forces up to six times their body weight, a feat that makes it possible for them to take flight with such things as stolen peanut-butter sandwiches—or, under more natural conditions, enormous pine cones. Indeed, even advanced stages of pregnancy seem to have little impact on the squirrels’ flying capabilities.
Laboratory studies also found that the squirrels fly at remarkably high speeds and have a puzzling ability to control their acceleration throughout the flight. The benefits of this are clear: Increased speed enhances maneuverability, which is critical for an animal that flies through an obstacle-strewn forest at night. However, the recorded speeds vastly exceed those that could be generated by a glide itself. Somewhere in the flying squirrel’s little body resides a mysterious mechanism that, without the power of flapping or internal combustion, generates exceptional lift, comparable to that of powered flight.
With each of thee discoveries, it became increasingly obvious that flying squirrels are so overbuilt for flight that simple laboratory challenges of gliding from perch to perch, or up and down flights of stairs at the prodding of research assistants, were not enough to reveal their complete flight repertoire. I needed to take my study to the wild, where flight performance is a question of life and death, or at least of mating success. And that is what brought me to this forest in northwestern Montana in the middle of a frigid February night.
On the lakeshore that night, shortly after 2:30 a.m. under a nearly full moon, I was treated to an unforgettable air show. It started with a cloud of snow dust kicked up by two males chasing each other on the upper branches of a spruce tree high overhead. One of the males lost his grip and dove into a glide over the lake, to be followed immediately by the rapidly accelerating glide of the second male. Both landed and resumed their squabble in the upper canopy on the other side of the lake, seemingly without much loss of elevation despite a glide of at least 50 meters.
Soon after, I spotted the female sitting quietly above me on a snow-covered branch. She was perched up against the tree’s trunk in mid-canopy, inspecting a large cone likely left by a red squirrel earlier in the day. A few seconds later, a third male parachuted down from a nearby tree, somehow steering at the end of his near vertical descent to land on the trunk just below the female. A moment later, the female crouched, and in a powerful 40-degree jump, with body fully extended and limbs outstretched, she launched herself high into the air.
For a second or so, her patagium remained completely folded, with her flattened tail held vertically, giving additional lift. When she reached the peak of her jump, with the high-speed strobes illuminating her every move, she spread the patagium wide, completely flattened the silvery fur on her body and tail and seemed to freeze in midair for a couple of moments before gracefully gliding out of view across the snow-covered lake. For several minutes, I could see the occasional puff of snow dust and could hear the muted squabbles drifting over the frozen expanse. Then, just like that, the group disappeared into the darkness and the night’s silence was restored.
I would spend the next several weeks analyzing frame-by-frame the footage I captured from this stunning performance, deciphering the array of elegant solutions the squirrels employed to solve major aerodynamic problems—some previously unknown, others suggested by laboratory research. Foremost among the latter was the squirrels’ extensive deployment of a “wing tip”—a protruding cartilaginous rod outside the wrist—sort of a long sixth finger. This trait was first described 20 years ago by mammalogist Richard Thorington at the Smithsonian Institution, who speculated that the wing tips were used in the same way as the winglets of modern jets. These vertical metal plates added to the ends of wings revolutionized air travel after NASA began installing them in the 1970s. Flying squirrels evolved wing tips about 20 million years earlier, and have been perfecting their use ever since.
In both the squirrels and the aircraft, the wing tips deflect and retain large air vortices that form along the leading edge of wings and thus generate substantial lift. But in a crucial difference compared to the aircraft, flying squirrels can independently and dynamically control their wing tips on the left and right, folding and extending them as needed to modify the speed and trajectory of glides in mid-flight. This enables them, for example, to make sharp turns in mid-air to avoid obstacles or evade attacking owls.
Generation after generation, natural selection has continued to refine flying squirrel aerodynamics. While air vortices tend to form naturally during a glide, flying squirrels take this a step further. They actively generate additional vortices, and increase lift, using an ingenious adaptation that human engineers copied in the design of the world’s first supersonic jet in 1969. Unlike most gliding mammals, flying squirrels have an additional fur-covered membrane between their necks and wrists that directs air flow to the main portion of the patagium just behind. This flap can be curved down, guiding airflow and generating significant forward acceleration and lift during take-off, then retracted during high-speed chases, or flattened and merged with the main patagium in long-distance glides. In the course of a single flight, the flying squirrel integrates precursors of some of the best inventions of human aircraft engineering over the last century, morphing flawlessly from a canard supersonic airplane design to an agile jet to a blended wing-body aircraft.
And then there is the squirrel’s ultimate secret weapon: the patagium itself. It appears early in each squirrel’s development as a massive outgrowth of skin between hind and forelegs—making a brood of baby flying squirrels in a nesting cavity look remarkably like a stack of pancakes. As the young squirrels grow into their oversized skin, diverse muscle and nerve groups fill the patagium. The result is distributed control of the membrane, with some muscles being controlled locally and others by distant nerve centers.
The importance of such distributed control is that the squirrel can adjust the membrane’s billowing and stiffness independently across the patagium, and between the left and right sides. Part of the wing can be rigid while the other part is pliable, all in response to nerve signals from local stretch receptors that detect minute changes in airflow. Combined with a wide range of limb movements during flight, such local control allows squirrels to actively modify wing size, shape, and stiffness during an aerial chase—from a thin, fully extended membrane in the middle of long-distance glides to fully inflated furry parachutes for slowing down at the end of steep descents. Designing a wing that can instantly change in stiffness and configuration in response to minute changes in local air pressure and flow remains a dream for human aircraft engineers.
Muscles in the patagium also control the orientation of specialized hairs at the membrane’s edges. For example, unusually long, stiff hairs on the leading edge of the patagium are often held at variable angles during take-off and landing, generating multiple mini-vortices that are then trapped on the wing’s surface, providing lift. A band of these hairs along the sides of patagium also generates substantial local turbulence during flight and—together with a pliable wing surface—seems to create a traveling corridor for air vortices along the edge of the gliding membrane.
It’s now clear from our field observations that mid-flight changes in lift and acceleration are closely associated with a change in billowing of the gliding membrane and, in particular, with the formation of waves on the patagium surface. Amazingly, the squirrels appear to actively direct trapped air vortices across the membrane surface. The closest analogy from human engineering would be tiltrotors—aircraft, such as the V-22 Osprey, with variably tilted rotors attached to fixed wings that combine the high speed and range of a conventional plane with the lift capacity and take-off versatility of a helicopter. The crucial difference is that flying squirrels can instantly modify the size, number, and location of their “rotors” in response to minute changes in airflow and pressure—an achievement that is well beyond modern aircraft engineering.
At the end of a long field season, while waiting in the Great Falls International Airport for my flight back to the University of Arizona, I walk through one of the largest private collections of aircraft models showcased there. Most inventions in aerodynamic design are represented—from the delta-wing and wing-body airplanes of the familiar Concord and B-2 stealth bomber to the lesser known variable-sweep wing design that converts a fighter jet into a long-range cruiser in mid-flight to bizarre looking canard airplanes with two pairs of wings.
As I browse, I try to imagine what a collection of nature’s innovations for animal flight would look like. Nature had about a billion years longer to experiment with various ways to get animals as diverse as insects, frogs, reptiles, and mammals airborne, so one would think such a collection would be enormous. Surprisingly, this is not the case. That’s because, over the course of evolution, a typical animal flier might accumulate dozens of redundant aerodynamic solutions—some nearly perfect, some half-working, but all contributing to getting an animal airborne, while at the same time preserving uninterrupted paths for future adaptations. The end result is a prized combination of functional versatility and exceptional robustness of nature’s flying solutions—something we have yet to achieve in human engineering. The flying squirrel is a premier example of this, easily encompassing in one small furry package the content of several of the display cases in front of me: the aerodynamic features of heavy transport planes, agile military jets, movable-rotor helicopters, flexible-wing parachute gliders, and many innovations we’ve yet to achieve.
According to conventional wisdom, Latin is a dead language. But a simple Amazon search shows that it still has a surprisingly active life not just in medical and law terminology, but also in children’s books.
After serving as the chief language of ancient Rome, and then as the language of scholars and holy men, Latin mostly faded out of modern usage. Even its study is becoming increasingly rare. But there are still some publishers and scholars who are taking modern works, mainly kids’ books, and translating them from modern English into what can best be described as a kind of modern Latin.
From picture books like Walter the Farting Dog, to longer works like Winnie the Pooh, and the first two books in the Harry Potter series, a wide variety of titles have made the jump to Latin over the years. Children’s books make good candidates for such translation work due to their simplified language and length, and in turn can give the study of Latin a more contemporary feel. But this doesn’t mean that turning these books into Latin in the first place is any small feat.
“Green Eggs and Ham was very difficult,” says Terence Tunberg, who has been teaching Latin for over 30 years. Along with his wife, Jennifer, he has translated a number of children’s books into Latin.
“[They’re] a good teaching tool, there’s no doubt about that. We did not try to write simple Latin," says Tunberg. "We tried to translate it the best we could given the resources of the Latin language without dumbing it down.”
Tunberg, who specializes in neo-Latin, the use of Latin after the Romans were dead and gone, never planned on translating kids’ books, but was contacted by prominent Classics textbook publisher Bolchazy-Carducci, who had purchased the rights to some of Dr. Seuss’ works. Given his background with the language, and his interest in how Latin evolved after Rome, the prospect of translating these modern works was right up his alley. Of course, the real reasons for the project didn’t escape him.
“As a textbook publisher, they’re out to make money. They caught on to the idea that if they have very young children's stories in Latin along with the regular books by Caesar and Cicero and all these other people, it would be a draw. And they were right. I still get royalties,” says Tunberg.
But the books, especially those of Seuss, presented a number of unique translation problems. As Tunberg explains, the real trick to a good translation isn’t always in the word-for-word conversion, but in maintaining the meaning and the voice of the original work. Given Seuss’ penchant for nonsense words and rare poetic meters (anapestic tetrameter, anyone?), converting his writing into a dead language, with its smaller vocabulary for describing certain modern concepts, wasn’t easy. Certain changes had to be made.
For The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham, Tunberg relied on a poetic form from the Middle Ages that could work in Latin, yet sounded more modern than traditional Latin poetry. “The challenge there was obviously the Seussian wording, but also he had his own kind of rhythmical rhyme. We wrote How The Grinch Stole Christmas in a very alliterative prose,” says Tunberg. While the Latin might not have been able to recreate the book’s rhyme scheme, by relying on alliteration, Tunberg was able to maintain the playfully poetic feel of Seuss’ original.
Another issue, of course, is Seuss’ made-up language. How should one describe a concept like Whoville in How the Grinch Stole Christmas? In order to effectively translate the invented words from Seuss’ original work, they had to look at what the author intended. “The Whos are happy, contented people. The Grinch is jealous, lonely, and wants to strike out at those he feels are having a good time when he’s not having a good time," explains Tunberg. "So the Whoville people were ‘the happy ones,’ ‘the contented ones.’ We produced a little coinage in Latin, ‘Laetopoli,’ which sounds good. It sounds kind of Seussian, and it means ‘Happyville.’”
By facing the unique challenges of these modern translations, Tunberg was effectively reviving the language and using it to make brand new (and somewhat silly) words. These days, the Latin children’s book genre continues to sell well among new and seasoned students of the language, bringing in new readers and translators every year, and making the ancient language seem ever more approachable.
In recent years Tunberg stopped translating modern children’s works, choosing to shift his attentions to his research. There are still books he’d like to see translated into Latin, though, like Treasure Island, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Lord of the Rings (a Latin translation of The Hobbit, Hobbitus Ille, was published in 2012). To him, these swashbuckling stories are a great match for the vocabulary of the Latin language.
“If you want to keep Latin alive, and you want to keep people interested in it, the availability of that stuff is always good," says Tunberg. "Ultimately the classics gain too, because the student who reads my imagined version of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea is more likely to end up reading Virgil and Cicero.”
It might seem strange to be reverse-engineering modern works into a dead language like Latin, but it’s the only way we’re going to keep it alive.
At the bottom of Castle Hill is the Széchenyi Chain Bridge, Hungary’s first permanent structure to cross the Danube River. It opened in 1849, and the solid span of wrought iron and stone connected Buda and Pest, the two sides of the capital city.
At the top of the hill, rising over 300 feet at an almost 40-degree incline, is Buda Castle—with no easy way, at the time, to get there from the bridge. That changed 21 years later with the opening of the Budavári Sikló, Europe’s second funicular railway. For the next 70-odd years the stepped cars took passengers up and down the equivalent of 30 flights of stairs. Those trips ended during World War II, when the line was destroyed during the bombing of Budapest.
Funiculars, also called incline or cable railways, go back hundreds of years. They use a fairly simple pulley system, harnessing the cars’ own counterweight to scoot up and down steep grades like Castle Hill. Without the Budavári Sikló to handle the job, access to Buda Castle meant taking the circuitous route of an autobus. Or worse, walking.
Luckily pieces of the funicular had been salvaged after the bombing. It took a long time, but in 1986 the little-railway-that-could reopened along its original track, with most of its original design. It’s now operated by Budapest Public Transport, serving both head-down commuters and eyes-up tourists. The panoramic views of the Danube and west side of the city are unparalleled, and in 1987 the entire Buda Castle District, including the Budavári Sikló, was added to the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
This tiny public bath is hiding in plain sight in the most touristy part of Stockholm.
Storkyrkobadet is located in a vault, in the basement of a building dating back to the 17th century in Stockholm's Old Town. The building was originally a Dominican convent during which time the vault served alternately as a coal and wine cellar. In the 1890s, the building was converted to a primary school, and the vault became the baths for the students. It would take another half century before a sauna was built and the bath was opened to the public.
The bath is still old fashioned in many ways, with its architecture and interior unchanged since it was first built. It consists of just one shallow pool and a number of tiny tubs where visitors can sit and relax.
Throughout the years, Storkyrkobadet has become a popular meeting point for the gay community, probably because of the separate opening hours for men and women. Sweden's most famous gay couple, Jonas Gardell and Mark Levengood, met here in the 1980s.
Despite its popularity and history, Storkyrkobadet's existence is in danger. The city planned to close it in the '80s but thanks to a volunteer organization called Föreningen De Glada Badarnait ("Society of Merry Bathers") it was able to live on—at least for another few decades. Facing increasing costs, as of 2016 the future of this hidden oasis is again uncertain, but a small group of enthusiasts are doing everything in their power to keep it open.
Centuries ago, before modern medicine, in a time when humans fought disease and sickness in more, uh, mystical ways, ancient Romans centered on a solution that today might get you reported, or at least looked at askance: amulets for you and your children shaped like giant penises. The amulets—and also, frequently, wind chimes—were shaped like a fascinum, or a divine penis, to ward off disease and the evil eye.
But they were used for more than that, too, as ancient Roman boys also wore the amulets, called bullae, to indicate their social status (like whether they were slaves or free boys), while young girls had a similar counterpart. In order to increase the efficacy of a bulla or another adornment, such as a kid’s ring, they were crafted into the shape of, or adorned with, giant penises.
"The sexual energy of the phallus was tied directly to its power in reproduction,” according to classicist Anthony Philip Corbeill. The fertile power of a phallus, it was thought, would keep them safe.
This was important, primarily because in the Roman world, children were exceptionally vulnerable to sickness, with up to half of all Roman children dying before the age of five, according to the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Which made it understandable, then, that mothers resorted to magical methods to protect their offspring.
But, as Pliny the Elder noted in his Natural History, fascina weren’t just limited to kids: “Infants are under the especial guardianship of the god Fascinus, the protector, not of infants only, but of generals as well.” Which means that when a general was parading through Rome in triumph, surrounded by booty and slaves, he’d likely also have a fascinum hanging on his chariot. Or, as Pliny described: “It is the image of this divinity that is attached beneath the triumphant car of the victorious general, protecting him, like some attendant physician, against the effects of envy.”
Other fascina are double-headed. One side of the amulet is a penis, the other a clenched fist. What does the latter symbolize? A fist with the thumb thrust up between the index and middle figures is often called the “fig,” or mano fica. It’s a dirty thumbs-up that’s symbolic of a penis and genitalia in general; so carving both a talisman with both a fascinum and a “fig” on it would make this twice as powerful at warding off evil.
And then there are the penis bullae with wings carved on them (cue the Red Bull ad here). Why turn a fascinum into a half-genital, half-bird hybrid? Flying capabilities made them more effective threats—and thus better protectors—against invidia (envy, or the evil eye), but they were also a throwback to the ancient Greeks, from whom the Romans co-opted some cultural and religious ideas. In this case, it might’ve started with language. “The Greek word for ‘wing’ also served as a euphemism for phallus,” Erich Segal wrote in The Death of Comedy. This pun also rears its head in Plato’s Phaedrus, in which Eros (erotic love) has to grow his wings before he can “take flight.”
As a result of the fascinum’s effectiveness, Pliny claimed its worship formed “part of the Roman rites.” Its worship was “entrusted to the Vestal Virgins,” the chaste priestesses of the goddess Vesta. It might seem a bit odd to give a giant phallus monument to virgins, but the Vestals were actually all about fertility. As the classicist Mary Beard noted in a 1980 article, “it seems as if the virgin was not looked upon as sterile but as a mediator of stored up, potential procreative power.”
And, today, fascina live on in the English language, in the word "fascinate." If you’re fascinated with something, in other words, you might just be thinking that it looks like a penis.
It's the holiday season, and sometime over the course of the past few days, odds are good that you cracked some nuts. Maybe you used a simple metal nutcracker. Maybe you used one of those fancy ones that look like toothy men.
Or maybe, accidentally, you used something else entirely. According to China Radio International, a man from Shaanxi recently realized that his trusty nutcracker, which he has been using for the past quarter century, was actually a hand grenade.
The object, which has the long handle and blunt end of a good walnut-smasher, doesn't look much like a grenade. A friend had given it to him in 1991, the man said. But when he came across a police safety leaflet with illustrations of lesser-known bombs and grenades, "he realized [he] possessed a forbidden explosive, and had been banging it against things for years," writes CRI.
He has turned the rogue nutcracker over to police, who will try to figure out if it can still explode. In the meantime, he is getting blown up on Weibo. "Why would a friend gift him a bomb?" one commenter asked. Perhaps they just wanted to make his life more exciting.
The Hvítá river is formed by the meltwater from the Lángjökull glacier pouring out of Hvítávatn lake to begin its journey to the sea. About 40 kilometers (25 miles) downstream the wide, rushing river suddenly turns and tumbles into a deep, narrow crevice set at an oblique angle to the original course, forming a truly spectacular waterfall in the process.
Gullfoss translates as "Golden Falls," and was so named because the high sediment content of glacial water makes it glow gold in the sunlight as it roars over the cataract. Gullfoss consists of three separate drops: a relatively gentle three-step staircase that begins the descent; and a two-stage waterfall with plunges of 11 meters (36 feet) and 21 meters (69 feet). The river then continues to flow south through a deep and narrow canyon with walls up to 70 meters (230 feet) high.
In the 20th century, Gullfoss was considered for hydroelectric development; although the property was leased by different interested parties, an actual project failed to materialize. There is a frequently-told story that attributes the unspoiled state of the site to Sigríður Tómasdóttir, the daughter of the leasor who worked tirelessly to block development and even threatened to jump to her death in the falls if a dam was built. This story does not seem to be true, but its popularity is such that a plaque overlooking the cascade honors her memory.
Today, Gullfoss is under the protection of the state, which maintains the falls in their natural state. This has proven to be a fairly successful arrangement, as Gullfoss is arguably Iceland's most popular waterfall, and undoubtedly one of the most popular tourist attractions in the country.
Shrouded in secrets within the Owl Mountains of southwestern Poland, there sits a magnificent castle where many Nazi conspiracy theories find their roots.
Ksiaz Castle is an impressive fortress rising up on a cliff embankment and surrounded by lush forests and immaculate gardens. With a history that dates to the 12th century, the imposing complex has had a wide variety of important owners and architectural acknowledgments that are worth a visit in their own right. Today, however, it is what lies under the castle that draws people's attention.
Ksiaz was confiscated by the Nazis during World War II, and tens of thousands of Nazi prisoners, mainly Jews from Hungary and Poland, were forced to build a massive subterranean complex with 12-meter high ceilings beneath the Gothic and Baroque ramparts that rose above.
Most of the network of underground structures lie unfinished directly beneath the castle and in the surrounding area, all part of the mysterious Project Riese (German for "giant"). One of the largest Nazi construction projects during the war, Project Riese continues to baffle historians and scholars due to it's top-secret status and the few documents that remain detailing it's purpose. One thing is for certain: Upon completion of Project Riese the castle was to become Adolf Hitler's personal headquarters.
It never did though. The project was never finished and Ksiaz was eventually captured by the Red Army which stole, destroyed, and secreted much of the information relevant to the project. To this day, little but word of mouth rumors and stories can be gleaned from locals who tell of secret atomic weapons or hidden Nazi trains that are laden with valuable art and treasure, said to be booby trapped with extensive weaponry and lying within the soil around the complex.
Every year, treasure seekers from around the globe can be found hunting the hills around the castle with metal detectors and dousing rods, hoping to be the one to find a cache of Nazi gold or any sort of hint to the secrets the castle's underground complexes may hold.
Founded in 1982 as a not-for-profit educational organization with a mission to preserve America's historical railroad heritage, the Silver Creek and Stephenson Railroad operates several antique locomotives on the Midwest's forgotten rails, allowing passengers unparalleled access to the inner workings of driving a train.
Freeport's local Stephenson County Antique Engine Club operates the Stephenson and Silver Creek Railroad, running their assortment of original engines, covered flat cars, and cabooses along a 1.72-mile stretch of rail purchased from the defunct Milwaukee Road in 1983. There was just one catch; before the railroad sold their right-of-way, the company tore up the tracks.
For the next two years, members spent their spare time salvaging rail and ties from throughout Illinois, and sometimes as far away as Mankato, Minnesota. This means that though they had an operational fleet of enviable engines and cars, the first track wasn't laid – all by the blood, sweat, and tears of members of the club's own hands – until May 28th, 1985.
Today, the crown jewel of Silver Creek and Stephenson Railroad's collection is the 1912 Heisler 36-ton, gear-driven steam locomotive, which takes passengers for a 3.4 mile out-and-back ride. For many passengers, the highlight is the option to ride up front with the engineer and fireman who, for just a few dollars extra, will give you the "privilege" of assisting with shoveling coal.
The station is located across the road from the club's building which houses a museum containing, among other stationary steam engines, an operational 130-Ton Cooper Corliss, which is one of the largest in the country.
Uluru, in Australia, is one of the wonders of the world: a massive rock in the middle of pretty much nowhere that is sacred to indigenous peoples and very hot all of the time.
It also doesn't rain very much, but this week, it did, making for some impromptu, and very beautiful, waterfalls. Here's a video of some of them:
In case you didn't see the rain at Uluru, here's another video to wet your appetite courtesy Rees Hughes #SeeUlurupic.twitter.com/8iVpEVuYB5
How scarce is rain there? Normally, the rock only averages about 11 inches a year—but this year, according to Sky News, it saw nine inches of rain on Christmas night alone, which officials said was a once-in-50-years weather event.
And while it's too late for you to catch this in person, you should visit, as nearly a half million people do every year—to climb, take pictures, and, occasionally, remove their clothes.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
