The strange Cold War bar codes across America

The "bar code" at Walker Field, Maryland Adjacent to the runway of a Navy airfield in Maryland is a paved rectangle.  And within that area are a series of quadrilaterals painted bright white, in pairs and ascending in size. By itself its existence would be a mystery, or at least a curiosity.  Except that it is one of dozens to be known throughout the United States,...

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Raoul Wallenberg and Dan Cooper: New clues in two massive mysteries

Sixty-six years after he disappeared into the prisons of the Soviet Union, new information has been discovered about the fate of Raoul Wallenberg.Raoul Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat who became one of the most revered heroes of World War II. At the height of the Holocaust, Wallenberg was able to rescue and shelter tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews who would have otherwise...

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How did a thirty-year old scrap of Richmond newspaper get into my driveway?

For two days now this has been wigging me out. Think y'all will understand why as you read on...Saturday afternoon my girlfriend arrived at my house. It's about a hundred miles or so between where we live (only an hour and a half of drive time, and less if the Virginia state troopers aren't looking :-P). She came at 2 and we were hanging out here when a short while later...

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Why are fish and birds mass-perishing all over the world?

Awright, so at this point we've got......Thousands of dead fish and birds in Arkansas...Thousands of dead fish in a river in Florida...Bunches of dead birds in Kentucky...More dead birds in Louisiana...Thousands of dead fish in the Chesapeake Bay area...Dead fish in New Zealand...Countless birds found dead in Sweden...Tons of dead fish washing ashore in Brazil...Thousands of dead birds found in eastern TexasSo, what's going on here? This kind of...

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Has the Poe Toaster gone "Nevermore"?

Very unusual and perplexing news coming out of Baltimore this morning: the Poe Toaster did NOT show up to make his/her annual tribute to Edgar Allan Poe! For the first time since the ritual has been recorded - at least since 1949 - it simply didn't happen.Every year on Poe's birthday of January 19th, in the very early morning hours, a mysterious figure has come out of the darkness to visit the original burial site of Poe. The Poe Toaster leaves...

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Mystery: Swiss watch found in 400-year old Chinese tomb

Shades of Michael Crichton's Timeline, or television's Lost: archaeologists are stumped at the discovery of a Swiss watch within a Chinese tomb that was sealed more than four hundred years ago. While excavating the Ming-era tomb in southern China, researchers heard a metallic object hit the floor. When they picked it up they discovered, encrusted with the detritus of time,...

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Sign of the times: Spam production can't keep up with demand

The New York Times is reporting that Hormel is pulling out all the stops to keep up with a sudden demand for Spam. The classic "mystery meat in a can" was first introduced over seventy years ago and ever since has become a staple food for hard economic times, having cemented that status during the lean years of World War II. And now as many seriously wonder if we might be...

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Romanov mystery solved: DNA testing ends ninety years of speculation

It was one of the most tantalizing mysteries of the Twentieth Century. And had I not been so busy with other things, I would not have missed the announcement about three weeks ago that the last members of Tsar Nicholas II's family had finally been found...Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia, and his family in a photo taken in 1911Nicholas and his family, along with several...

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CLOVERFIELD ending: Where was it and who saw what?

Call it the Zapruder Film of monster movies: right now the Internet is buzzing with discussion about what might have happened in the very last shot of Cloverfield, which opened yesterday.I went to see Cloverfield yesterday afternoon, and last night I posted my review of it. It wasn't long afterward that an anonymous reader made the following intriguing comment...In case you are wondering where the monster came from in the closing scene where it...

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