In 1725, a prominent university dean made a discovery that promised to redefine the scientific understanding of the natural world.

In 1798, a British captain sailing the South Pacific spotted an eight-square-mile speck of land and named it “Pleasant Island.”

In 1941, an obituary appeared in The New York Times for a journalist who was very much alive. This man had faked his own death to evade Japanese forces.

Deep in the jungles of the South Pacific, men paint the letters USA on their bare chests and march in military formation carrying rifles carved from bamboo.

In 1998, the Pixar animation team watched in horror as the digital files for their upcoming feature, Toy Story 2, began to vanish from their computer screens.

High in the mountains of Da Nang, Vietnam, two colossal hands emerge from the cliffside, gripping a 492-foot shimmering walkway.

Long before modern billionaires existed, one merchant held two percent of Europe’s entire GDP.

Rising dramatically from the Tasman Sea, 12 miles (19.3 kilometers) southeast of Lord Howe Island, stands a massive, jagged basalt monolith.

In 1838, a Hungarian count donated his entire library to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, unwittingly handing over one of history’s most baffling mysteries.

On December 8, 1972, a commercial airliner plummeted into a Chicago neighborhood, killing 43 people on board.