On Christmas Day 1904, Swedish sailor Carl Emil Pettersson was shipwrecked off Tabar Island in Papua New Guinea. Carried to the local ruler, he soon married Princess Singdo, the king’s daughter. By 1907, he had become the island’s new king.

In 2000, the U.S. needed to refurbish aging nuclear warheads. But there was a problem: the government had forgotten how to make a classified material called Fogbank, crucial to their operation.

In May 1942, the U.S. Navy placed ten men and a dog named Explosion on Kiska, a desolate island in Alaska’s Aleutians, to operate a remote weather station. Their job was to report conditions to Dutch Harbor, nearly 700 miles away, unaware of what was coming.

On May 23, 1967, powerful solar flares erupted from the sun and reached Earth within minutes, triggering massive radio blackouts across U.S. military frequencies. At the height of the Cold War, this unexplained interference raised alarms of a possible Soviet electronic attack.

In March 1915, amid the thunder of World War I, a coal-heaver named Seyit Ali Çabuk performed an act that would be recorded in military reports and photographs.

In 1649, French engraver Claude Mellan created an image that left Paris audiences astonished. “The Sudarium of Saint Veronica,” his portrait of Christ’s face on a veil, was unlike anything seen before. It was engraved with a single spiraling line, starting at the tip of the nose.

In 1932, two young African-American sprinters—Tidye Pickett of Chicago and Louise Stokes of Malden, Massachusetts—earned places in the U.S. Olympic relay pool.

In 1928, Arthur “Art” Harold Beal bought a steep hillside lot in Cambria, California. Over the next five decades, using only a pick and shovel, he carved terraces into the slope and constructed a sprawling, eccentric home he called Nitt Witt Ridge.

On September 6, 1976, Soviet pilot Viktor Belenko flew a top-secret MiG-25 Foxbat from Vladivostok to Japan during a routine training mission. He landed on a short civilian runway in Hakodate with almost no fuel left, damaging the aircraft in the process and immediately requested asylum.

For over three decades, a man dressed head-to-toe in hand-stitched leather walked a 365-mile loop through Connecticut and New York. Known only as “The Leatherman,” he arrived in each town every 34 days, slept in rock shelters, and accepted food in silence.