On a spring night in April 1983, a thief slipped past security at the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem. In the darkness, he stole 106 rare clocks valued in the tens of millions of dollars, including a $30 million watch commissioned for Marie Antoinette, before vanishing without a trace.

In 1841, a young Japanese fisherman named Nakahama Manjiro was shipwrecked with four other crew members on a remote island in the Pacific. Rescued by an American whaling ship, the John Howland, Manjiro was taken to the United States, making him one of the first Japanese people to set foot on American soil.

John William Boucher served in the Union Army for seven months during the Civil War, fighting at the Battle of Nashville in December 1864. Over half a century later, at age 72, he enlisted again to serve in World War I, becoming one of the oldest men to serve on the battlefield.

In 2018, the world’s attention turned to North Sentinel Island, a remote part of the Andaman Islands, when American missionary John Allen Chau was killed by the Sentinelese tribe, known for their isolation and hostility toward outsiders. The incident quickly became a viral sensation, sparking debates on cultural preservation and modern intrusions.

In the 1930s, German brothers Walter and Reimar Horten were fascinated by aviation. They began experimenting with glider designs and were especially interested in creating aircraft with low drag and high lift.

Born in 1916 in Ukraine, Lyudmila Pavlichenko was a history student when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. She joined the Red Army as a volunteer and became a sniper, showing exceptional skill with a rifle.

Klaus Fuchs, a German-born physicist, fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and settled in Britain. During World War II, he joined the British atomic bomb project and was later sent to the United States to work on the Manhattan Project, contributing to the development of the first nuclear weapons.

Carhenge, located in Alliance, Nebraska, was created in 1987 by Jim Reinders as a tribute to his father. Inspired by England’s Stonehenge, Reinders used 38 vintage cars to replicate the famous structure, arranging them in a circle measuring 96 feet in diameter.

When Nazi tanks entered Paris on June 14, 1940, the Musée de l’Homme remained open, displaying a defiant message on its door. The museum’s director, Paul Rivet, would soon become a key figure in the French Resistance, leading a covert network against the occupying forces.

In 1725, the village of Kisiljevo, on the edge of the Habsburg Empire, was gripped by fear. Locals believed that Petar Blagojević, who had died ten weeks earlier, had returned from the grave to kill nine villagers. The victims claimed Blagojević had attacked them at night, and all died within 24 hours.