Month: March 2026

Juan Pujol was born in Barcelona in 1912 to a family of moderate means and liberal political beliefs. The onset of war in 1939 convinced him that he should make a contribution to the good of humanity. He decided contact the British authorities and offer to spy against Germany. Each time his approaches were rebuffed. In contrast, Pujol had no difficulty making contact with German Intelligence in Madrid, sayinghe was a Spanish government official of fanatical pro-Nazi persuasions. He was given a crash course in espionage. Instead of travelling to England, Pujol actually moved to Lisbon and began work creating a network of wholly imaginary sub-agents. By 1944 Pujol and Harris, working together, had invented no fewer than 27 sub-agents, each with full life stories. The fictional agents included such characters as a Venezuelan in Glasgow, an indiscreet US army sergeant and a Welsh nationalist leading a group of Fascists called the “Brothers of the Aryan World Order” in Swansea. (via MI5)

People who lose their vision sometimes develop a condition where they see imaginary things

For those stricken with Charles Bonnet Syndrome, the world is occasionally adorned with vivid yet unreal images. Some see surfaces covered in non-existent patterns such as brickwork or tiles, while others see phantom objects in astonishing detail, including people, animals, buildings, or whatever else their minds may conjure. These images linger for as little as several seconds or for as much as several hours, appearing and vanishing abruptly. They may consist of commonplace items such as bottles or hats, or brain-bending nonsense such as dancing children with giant flowers for heads. Most of those afflicted with Charles Bonnet Syndrome are people in the early stages of sight loss, and the hallucinations usually begin while their vision is still present but slowly diminishing. (via Damn Interesting)

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Continue reading “He was the most successful double agent of all time”

When I was growing up, my mother used to refer to the egg as “your father’s ego”, while to the rest of the world it was known as the Argyle Library Egg by Kutchinsky. I felt a mix of pride and bafflement towards my father’s creation. I was thrilled to take its Guinness World Records certificate to school to show my friends, but I didn’t understand why anyone would want an egg that big which wasn’t made out of chocolate. But after the egg, life was never the same. It came to bear responsibility for the loss of our century-old business, the implosion of my parents’ marriage and Dad’s untimely death. After the family firm was sold, the egg was seized by creditors and locked away. It vanished but its shadow lingered. Mum raged against it as if it were human. A villain that stole her livelihood and husband, and robbed her children of a father. I was meant to hate it, too. But I couldn’t. Just like I couldn’t hate Dad when he left. (via The Guardian)

Buster Keaton’s films were all destroyed and then James Mason bought his house

During Buster Keaton’s golden era, he helped to design his house behind the Beverly Hills Hotel. The house contained a movie theatre, complete with a projector, perfect for showing guests unfinished films. Although Keaton loved the villa, when he divorced Natalie, she took his fortune and property. According to filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, when Keaton’s career was disintegrating, “the studio said, ‘look, all of your films… we are reclaiming the silver out of the copies of these films.’ […] So all of these masterpieces that Buster Keaton created were gone. And they were gone. And he lived his life until the 1950s, just accepting that all of this work that he had done will never ever be seen.” However, in 1948, Pamela Mason, the wife of British actor James Mason, became enamoured by his former house. While refurbishing it, the Masons took down a wall in part of a screening room and found pristine prints of Keaton’s films. (via Far Out magazine)

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Continue reading “His obsession with jewelled eggs destroyed his family”

Mauricio Morales was leading a group of migrants he had found at a bus station through Mexico City’s San Rafael neighbor­hood. They had just crossed a busy boulevard and were making their way down a side street when the five large utility vans lurched to a stop in front of them. Men with machine guns, wearing tactical gear, spilled out and started barking orders and threats. Were they police? Military? Mau couldn’t tell. Within seconds, the migrants were being shoved into the vans. When Mau tried to resist, something hard hit him on the head, and he fell to the ground. As he was loaded into the back of one of the vans, he heard gunshots. After some research, they discovered that they had inadvertently kidnapped a world-class athlete—­an Olympic runner who’d competed in Beijing, London, and Rio de Janeiro. This was serendipitous, Don Paco explained, because he happened to be in the market for athletes. (via The Atlantic)

This American high roller lost a staggering $200 million gambling in Las Vegas

Terrance Watanabe inherited Oriental Trading Company, a company selling party supplies, arts and crafts, toys, novelties, and school supplies founded by his father Harry Watanabe. After selling his company, Watanabe became known for his lavish gambling habits. In 2007, he was reported to have lost $127 million at Caesars Palace and The Rio in Las Vegas after having gambled a total of $825 million. He was banned from Wynn Las Vegas for compulsive gambling. Watanabe is estimated to have lost approximately $204 million. Caesars Entertainment was fined $225,000 by the New Jersey Gaming Commission for allowing Watanabe to continue gambling in a highly intoxicated state. Caesars Rewards created a special tier for him known as Chairman” which ranks above Seven Stars. Watanabe received tickets to the Rolling Stones, $12,500 a month for airfare, and $500,000 in credit at the gift stores. Harrah’s also offered 15% cash back on table losses greater than $500,000 and other incentives. (via Wikipedia)

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Continue reading “He said he was kidnapped and forced to play football for his life”

Dozens of previously dismissed radio signals were actually credible transmissions from Amelia Earhart, according to a new study of the alleged post-loss signals from Earhart’s plane. The transmissions started riding the air waves just hours after the pilot sent her last in-flight message. The study, presented by researchers of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, sheds new light on what may have happened to the legendary aviator 75 years ago. “Amelia Earhart did not simply vanish on July 2, 1937. Radio distress calls believed to have been sent from the missing plane dominated the headlines and drove much of the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy search,” said Ric Gillespie. “When the search failed, all of the reported post-loss radio signals were categorically dismissed as bogus and have been largely ignored ever since,” he added. (via NBC News)

Platypus biology turns out to be even weirder than scientists originally thought

One glance at the platypus and you’ll forgive the naturalists who assumed it was a clever hoax upon first encountering preserved specimens more than 200 years ago. After all, the creatures appear to be a jumble of contradictions—they look like beavers but have duck bills, they’re mammals that lay eggs, and they produce milk without nipples. Platypuses glow under ultraviolet light, sense electricity through their bills, have a bewildering multitude of sex chromosomes, and the males possess venomous spurs behind their legs. Now, new research has added another oddity to the list: biologists from Belgium looked at platypus melanosomes—specialized pigment-bearing organelles inside cells—under an electron microscope. To their surprise, they discovered that the melanosomes were hollow and spherical. Previously, only birds were thought to possess hollow melanosomes, which produce more vibrant iridescent colors. (via Nautilus)

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Continue reading “Amelia Earhart sent distress signals that were ignored”

After his assassination on May 14, 1610, King Henry IV was embalmed and prepared for the grave. This was followed by about seven weeks of preparation and ceremony before he was buried at the basilica of Saint Denis, the traditional resting place of French kings. And there he rested until 1793, when the Revolution came calling. The government decided to celebrate the one year anniversary of the First Republic by desecrating the graves of all the royals buried at Saint Denis. When they opened his tomb, Henri’s body was apparently in a remarkable state of preservation. So much so they supposedly made a new death mask from his well-preserved face! They even propped him up for two days on display before adding him to the mass grave. Time passed, Napoleon did his thing, and Louis XVIII, who was Louis XVI‘s brother, was on the throne. As a Bourbon, he wanted to honor his ancestors and have the bones dug up and placed back in Saint Denis. And here’s where it gets even weirder. (via Paris Gone By)

What it’s like to take a guided tour of an abandoned shopping mall

Aryeh is here to take us to the mall — or, more accurately, to several malls, most of which are almost completely abandoned. In his spare time, he runs an organization called Liminal Assembly, which shuttles people through a series of decaying suburban shopping malls around the Greater Toronto Area, places that seem stuck in purgatory. Last winter, I stumbled upon an Instagram post advertising a party being held at an aging retail complex in Toronto’s Yorkville neighbourhood. Cumberland Terrace had somehow occupied the corner of Bay and Bloor Streets since the 1970s, wedged between luxury towers and some of Canada’s most expensive commercial real estate. I’d cut through its ghostly pathways hundreds of times en route to the subway, perplexed by its perpetually shuttered food court and wall of pay phones, its increasingly dwindling storefronts. It seemed out of place, occupying neither past nor present. (via Hazlitt)

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Continue reading “A skull sitting in a bank vault in Paris could be Henry IV’s”

You may have seen the recent headlines about how a company called Niantic Spatial is using a database of real-world locations that was originally compiled by players of the mobile game Pokemon Go — a game that launched about a decade ago and quickly became an obsession for tens of millions of people, young and old. Niantic Spatial says it plans to use the 3D models and locations to make it easier for delivery robots to find specific addresses in order to drop off pizza or groceries or whatever they are doing. The company was spun off from Niantic last year, after it sold Pokemon Go and its other games to a company called Scopely, which is ultimately owned by the sovereign investment fund of Saudi Arabia. Pokemon Go and other Niantic games will still run on Niantic Spatial’s data, but the world they helped build will be used for something else now.

Niantic Spatial, not surprisingly, is pretty excited about how all this data has helped the company build what it calls a Visual Position System, using more than a million location models as the core of its Spatial Platform. The company is also pitching its tools to companies that want to create virtual reality or augmented reality experiences that can be hosted online or beamed into VR and AR glasses from Meta and others. However, some current and former Pokemon Go players don’t seem to love the idea that they and their smartphones were dragooned into a massive surveillance program that mapped real-world locations without their knowledge. “500 million people played pokemon go, scanned every street, building, and corner on earth [and] thought they were catching pikachu,” said one user on X. “Niantic was building a 30 billion image AI map of the world now powering delivery robots… you were the product the whole time.”

The company’s website says that in addition to the database of more than 30 billion images and locations from Pokemon Go, it is also doing its own real-time three-dimensional data capture using drones and other technologies, so that its customers can generate models of their stores or warehouses or mining operations and what have you. In many cases, Niantic says, traditional global positioning systems don’t provide enough granularity or detail within large cities for delivery robots to find specific physical addresses, but its location models can do so in almost every single major city in the world. “AI that understands the physical world,” Niantic says. “We are building a living model of the world that people and machines can talk to.” The Large Geospatial Model (LGM) is built on “real world data from ground and overhead sensors.”

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Continue reading “Pokemon Go created a 3D map of the world – but for what?”

At the age of 39, Dostoevsky starts publishing a literary magazine called Time with his brother. The following year the magazine is forced to close, due to a misunderstanding with the government about an article they published concerning Russia. Dostoevsky travels to Europe and experiences his first loss at the roulette wheel. He is reduced to pawning his possessions to survive. In April 1864, his first wife dies, and two months later, so does his brother. He invests all of the money he has in a new magazine, and also unwisely assumes all his brother’s debts, which means his financial freedom is tied to the success of the magazine. The magazine collapses a year later due to lack of funds. Dostoevsky signs a merciless contract with a publisher that requires him to deliver a book within a year, or he will lose the rights to anything he writes for the next nine years. He returns to Europe and loses all the money he has. (via Roulette Star)

He’s planning to sail a boat that is four feet wide and less than five feet long across the Atlantic

There’s a long history of people sailing across an ocean by themselves, or attempting to. Usually they are in small boats, which are easier to handle, which gives us the term “microyacht.” As the boats got smaller, the competitive nature of the sport went from the accomplishment of making it across the ocean to racing other solo sailors to seeing who can make the smallest boat to get there in. Andrew Bedwell is no novice in solo sailing, or even microyachting. His newest boat is the smallest yet, and will set a new world record if he makes it across the Atlantic in May. The microyacht, called the Big C V2, is only 4.5 feet wide. How long is it? He won’t reveal that, but it is shorter than the current record holder, which was 5 feet, 4 inches long (1.63 meters). It is made of aluminum and carries solar panels, a power system, food and water, sails, and even has room for Bedwell to stretch his legs out when sitting inside. (via Neatorama)

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Continue reading “Dostoevsky wrote a book in a month to pay off gambling debts”

A Utah woman who wrote a children’s book about coping with grief after her husband’s death was convicted of aggravated murder in his death by poisoning him with fentanyl. Jurors on Monday also found Kouri Richins guilty of fraudulently claiming insurance benefits after the death of Eric Richins in March 2022 at their home outside the ski town of Park City. Prosecutors say Kouri Richins slipped five times the lethal dose of the synthetic opioid into a cocktail that he drank. She was also convicted of other felony charges, including an attempted murder charge in what authorities alleged was another effort to poison her husband weeks earlier on Valentine’s Day with a fentanyl-laced sandwich. Richins was $4.5 million US in debt and falsely believed that when her husband died, she would inherit his estate worth more than $4 million US. After her husband’s death, Richins self-published a children’s book about grief to help her sons and other kids cope with the loss of a parent. (via the CBC)

That time the Soviet Union fired a secret space cannon while in orbit

A quarter-century after the Cold War came to a close, the only cannon that actually fired in space has finally come to light. Installed on the Almaz space station in the 1970s, the R-23M Kartech was derived from a powerful aircraft weapon; Aron Rikhter designed the original 23-millimeter cannon for the Tupolev Tu-22 Blinder supersonic bomber. That gun is relatively well known, but its space-based cousin has largely remained in obscurity. From the dawn of the Space Age, the prospect of American spacecraft approaching and inspecting Soviet military satellites—which, according to the Kremlin’s propaganda, were not even supposed to exist—terrified the secrecy-obsessed Soviet military. A team of scientists developed a 14.5-millimeter rapid-fire cannon that reportedly could hit targets as far as two miles away. Depending who you ask, the 37-pound weapon could fire from 950 to 5,000 shots per minute, blasting 200-gram shells at a velocity of 690 meters per second. (via Popular Mechanics)

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Continue reading “After she killed her husband she wrote a book on grief”

The FBI is reinvestigating infamous thief D.B. Cooper’s unsolved 1971 skyjacking of Northwest Orient Flight 305, despite having publicly declared the case closed in 2016. Richard Floyd McCoy Jr., a Vietnam veteran and experienced skydiver who carried out an almost identical skyjacking five months after Cooper, is one suspect being closely examined. His son, Richard McCoy III, supplied the bureau with a DNA sample to test against any remaining evidence roughly six months ago. He has also handed over one of his dad’s old parachutes and a logbook detailing practice jumps his father conducted before the Cooper hijacking and his copycat stunt in 1972. Rick told The U.S. Sun that he’s convinced his dad was DB Cooper. He claims his mom, Karen McCoy, told him and his sister on numerous occasions that their dad was the infamous skyjacker and that she helped plan both of his heists. (via The Sun)

Darwin’s kids doodled all over the original copy of his famous book On The Origin Of Species

Charles Darwin was not the only artistic, creative mind in the Darwin household. While Darwin’s manuscripts and journals are full of sketches of the natural world, many of his children inherited a similar love of art and nature. Darwin and his wife and first cousin Emma had ten children together – six boys and four girls, seven of whom survived into adulthood. At some point the Darwin children found their father’s masterpiece, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859), and drew all over it. George Darwin drew a taxonomy of the British infantry. Francis Darwin doodled a salad. One of them drew a caricature of Darwin. Scholars suspect that many of the drawings came from Francis, who went on to follow his father’s footsteps and become a botanist himself. The pictures show a young mind with a keen interst in the outdoors—from the swarms of gnats clustered around a flower to the flock of birds in the English sky. (via The Smithsonian)

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Continue reading “He says the infamous skyjacker D. B. Cooper was his father”

The Chevalier d’Éon was born Charles d’Eon de Beaumont on October 5, 1728, and would go on to be a French soldier, spy, diplomat and in mid-life, a woman named Charlotte. D’Eon’s military exploits in the Seven Years’ War, role in negotiating the Paris Peace Treaty, and daring service as a spy for French King Louis XV was overshadowed by speculation about their gender. Born biologically male, the Chevalier was legally declared female by French King Louis XVI and English courts and spent the last 33 years of their life as a woman. This famous figure blackmailed kings, fenced in dresses and courted controversy throughout their life — and after death. D’Eon was born to a noble family in Tonnerre, Burgundy. In 1756, d’Eon was recruited for the Secret du Roi, or King’s Secret, a network of spies working for French King Louis XV. D’Eon was sent to Russia in two capacities: Officially, as Secretary of the Embassy in St. Petersburg. Secretly, the King tasked d’Eon with gathering intelligence in the court of Empress Elizabeth in a bid to put a Frenchman on the Polish throne. (via History.com)

The fate of a man found dead in a wetsuit in a remote lake in Wales remains a mystery

Detectives hope a new digital recreation of a man’s face could help them work out who he was – 18 months on from his highly decomposed body being found in a remote mid Wales reservoir. The discovery of the man, who was wearing nothing but a XL Zone3 Agile wetsuit, sparked extensive police searches and international appeals, but no loved ones have ever come forward. Specialists at a Liverpool university have now used photographs, dental records and CT scans of the man’s skull to reveal he had “striking facial features”, including an overbite. Det Insp Anthea Ponting of Dyfed-Powys Police said she hoped the new images might finally solve the “unusual” mystery of the man in the wetsuit. A lone walker had spotted the man’s body floating a few metres out from shore at Claerwen Reservoir, the largest and most remote of a series of reservoirs in the picturesque Elan Valley in Powys. Despite the area being 20km (12 miles), from the nearest town, with no public transport service, no clue suggesting how the man got there has been uncovered either. (via the BBC)

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Continue reading “French spy was born a man but lived their life as a woman”

“Terra nullius.” Under international law, this Latin phrase meaning “nobody’s land” describes an area of land unclaimed by any sovereign nation-state. In an age where nearly every inch of the world’s landmass has been mapped, examples of terra nullius are exceedingly rare. Along the Croatian-Serbian border, a drawn-out dispute along the River Danube has resulted in claims of terra nullius around at least four small pockets of land. The boundary dispute began in 1947, after World War II, and flared again in the 1990s when attempts were made to restore the historical separation between Serbia and Croatia. Serbia claims its border runs down the center of the Danube; Croatia claims a different border, based on 19th-century land ownership maps, when the river ran a different course. 20-year-old Daniel Jackson, a dual British and Australian citizen, is the self-declared president of the “Free Republic of Verdis,” or Pocket 3, as it’s labeled on international maps. The microstate he lays claim to is located on the sandy shores of an uninhabited, 124-acre patch of land along the Danube. (via CNN)

It’s not looking good for a cow whose fate was sold off by a performance art group

Two years ago, a prankster art collective in Brooklyn known as MSCHF sold off shares in a black calf they nicknamed Angus, pledging to butcher him into burgers and leather handbags unless his arty stakeholders chose to save him. On March 13, the fully grown bull’s fate will be decided, and it’s looking grim.Only around a third of Angus’s 404 owners have plied their tokenized shares of the animal into the artists’ online Remorse Portal, signifying their wish to save his life. If Angus doesn’t cross the 50% mark by Friday, he’ll be butchered and shipped out as 1,200 hamburger patties and four leather handbags designed by the group to look like meat. The art world is typically accustomed to shock art, but “Our Cow Angus” is stirring up polarizing debates among collectors and on social forums at a level not seen since British artist Damien Hirst displayed rotting cow heads as art in the 1990s. Animal-rights activists are decrying MSCHF’s life-or-death project as a barbaric stunt while museum curators hail it as a relevant critique of consumer dissonance about beef. (via the WSJ)

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Continue reading “He says he is the ruler of a new country on the Danube river”

In In 2016, staff at both the U.S. and Canadian embassies in Cuba started reporting a host of unusual physical symptoms: severe headaches, nausea, muscle aches, nose bleeds, etc. Adults and children were both affected to varying degrees. Many of those who reported these symptoms said they heard high-pitched noises, clicks and other audio phenomena shortly before they felt the physical ailments in question. Many complained to their superiors, reports started getting out into the press, but little action was taken. Some within the military community — since the symptoms were also felt by members of the CIA and the Army — argued that the Russians must have some kind of microwave energy weapon that was causing these attacks. There was good reason for skepticism on the part of the U.S. government and other observers, however: namely, no existing weapon — even those in research labs — was believed to be capable of creating harmful sound waves that would affect individuals at close range.

There is a fairly long history of audio technology being used for things like crowd control etc. Police and other authorities in the U.S. have used what are called long-range acoustic devices or LRADs, large devices that emit a loud, painful sound over a long distance. These kinds of devices were used by police during demonstrations at the 2009 G20 Summit in Pittsburgh and during the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown. As of the year 2017, the LRAD Corporation, the company that originally created the device, was selling them to police forces and the military in more than 70 countries. For 30 years or more there have been devices that emit what’s called “infrasound,” which is sound waves that are too low for the human ear to hear, and they can cause pain and nausea — but the devices involved are large, and the sound waves are spread over a large area, so are useful only with groups.

After the initial reports in Cuba in 2016, the mystery continued, as more and more diplomatic staff in Cuba described feeling the same symptoms, with some lasting weeks or even months. One staffer had to get a hearing aid. Some members of the staff had to leave Cuba and return to their home country to seek medical attention, but the cause was still unknown. Cuban diplomats were expelled from the U.S. even though it wasn’t clear they were involved, or what even happened, and both Canada and the U.S. reduced the number of staff they had in Cuba to a minimum. Then came the medical and government reports investigating the cause of what had become known as “Havana Syndrome.” Both American and Canadian embassy workers were tested by their respective governments, and scientists said that brain scans of staff from both countries showed some neurological damage. Meanwhile, similar symptoms or “attacks” were reported at other U.S. embassy locations, including in Russia, Poland, and Taiwan.

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Continue reading “If Havana Syndrome is real it implies a massive coverup”