It’s generally assumed that anyone awake and on the internet at 3AM is caught in a internet pornography vortex, clicking through busty MILF video after busty MILF video, but the truth is even more degrading than tugging to picture of a guy getting his salad tossed. Most of us are probably on Wikipedia with over seven tabs open simultaneously reading up on ancient central Asian history, subterranean rivers in London and discovering that Ainsley Harriott had a hit single in the early 1990s. It may be special arcane knowledge to you but to everyone else it’s completely useless bollocks, that’s what the following list is, a collection of some mildly interesting mysteries that I have stumbled upon during late night Wiki-binges.
1. The Recording Of An Unknown Cosmonaut
No, that’s not the name of an American lo-fi indie band, although it is kind of a great name for one. It is, in fact, one of the creepiest recordings on the net. The story goes that a pair of young brothers from Italy, Achile and Giovanni Judica-Cordigla, found a bunch of radio equipment and set up their own listening station - ‘Torre Bert’ - in a disused German bunker to record radio communications from Soviet and US space missions. (I’ve struggled to fix the gears on my broken bike for a month now. These guys make my manly balls look like shriveled walnuts). In May 1961, they captured a radio transmission of a woman’s voice, the common translation is given as: “Isn’t this dangerous? Talk to me! Our transmission begins now. I feel hot. I can see a flame. Am I going to crash? Yes. I feel hot, I will re-enter…”. It stops there.
2. The Taman Shud Case
Also known as the ‘Mystery of the Somerton Man‘, this internet peculiarity is a murder case that has gone unsolved for over 60 years. On December 1st, 1948 at 6.30am, the body of an unidentified man was found on Somerton Beach in Adelaide, South Australia. All they found on the body was a unlit cigarette placed behind his ear, a used bus ticket from the city to St. Leonards in Glenelg, an unused second-class rail ticket from the city to Henley Beach, a comb, a pack of Juicy Fruit (what kinda grown ass man chews Juicy Fruit?), an Army Club cigarette packet containing Kenistas cigarettes and a box of matches (no wallet? again, what kind of man doesn’t own a wallet? Although using an Oyster card holder as a make-shift wallet is permissible).
A month later on January 14th a brown suitcase belonging to the man was found in Adelaide Railway Station. The police, hoping to find a lead, found that all identification marks on the clothes had been removed apart form the name “T.Keane” on one of the ties, “Keane” on a laundry bag and “Kean” on a vest. Cased solved right? Wrong. After further investigation yielded nothing, they came to the conclusion that whichever douche-bag removed the identification tags from the clothes had left the tags with “Keane” on them knowing full well that “Keane” wasn’t the dead man’s name. You gotta respect that level of dedication to the lulz.
Then the story gets more intense. A few months later in June they found a piece of paper with ‘Taman Shud’ written on in it in a secret compartment in his trouser pocket. A quick side note: HOW THE FUCK DO YOU MAKE A SECRET POCKET IN A POCKET? (I need somewhere safe to stash my mephedrone obviously). Anyway the Five-O called in some book nerds to find out the translation of ‘Taman Shud’, who recognised the writing as the phrase “ended”/”finished” which is found on the final page of The Rubaiyat Of Omar Khayyam - a collection of Persian poetry. Another breakthrough came when in November a man reading an article on the case realised that a copy of The Rubaiyat had been mysteriously left in the back seat of his unlocked car, the Po-Po did all that sciencey CSI shit on the book and found that the piece of paper was from torn from the pages of the recovered book.
On the back of the book they found this code:
The code has never been cracked and from here the story just becomes increasingly ridiculous:
* On the back of the book was a unlisted telephone number of a former nurse.
* The former nurse herself had a copy of The Rubaiyat which she gave to some guy.
* They found out the guy she gave it to was alive and well, and he still had his copy of The Rubaiyat that she originally gave to him.
(Quick time out: Was it just normal in those days for people to just have ridiculously obscure book of Persian poetry, what the fuck is going on? Is every generation just getting stupiderer?)
* The former nurse lived in the same suburb the mystery man visited the night he died.
You should check the wikipedia page for more bizarre coincidences that would challenge even the most staunch of logical thinkers.
3. Bloop
Bloop is the name given to an ultra-low frequency and extremely powerful unidentified sound that has been detected underwater several times during 1997 in a remote part of the South Pacific Ocean by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Apparently the audio profile matches that of a living creature, however, if the sound was emitted by an animal it would reportedly have to be several times the size of the largest known animal on Earth.
Although it just sounds like someone farting in a bath tub to me.
The Wow! Signal is amazing and could be the foreword to a whole new chapter of our understanding of intelligent life in the cosmos… It’s just that I have a fucking clue how it works. To understand it you have to get all those annoying fiddly sciencey details that drove me and my year 8 science (top set, obv) classmates to spend the whole year mentally abusing our poor sod of a teacher via cruel and unusual methods of torture - usually massive rubber band fights. If your reading Mr Manugeni, I’m really really sorry for undermining you at every turn and then bitching about how we never learnt anything in your classes.
But here’s what I do understand about this thing. In an attempt to imagine how intelligent alien beings might try to communicate with Earth two physicists from Cornell University, Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, theorised that the aliens would choose a radio transmission as their medium because radio waves are cheap to produce and don’t require much energy and travel vast distances across space. Cocconi and Morrison also believed that the aliens would choose a frequency that had meaning to intelligent creatures with knowledge of chemistry and mathematics. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and it resonates at very specific frequency of 1420 megahertz - bingo.
On August 15th 1977. The Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio University picked up a 72 second signal that was 30 times louder than the ordinary noise of deep space, just a tiny smidgen off of the expected frequency at 1420.4556 MHz. Alternative explanations so far have yielded nothing and the possibility that we’re looking at the only recorded signal received from space that has the quality of an intentional motive behind it remains.
If nothing else, this proves that watching every episode of The X-Files for ‘research’ instead of doing anything constructive is a completely valid use of your time.
5. The Count of Saint Germain
The legend that surrounds the Count of St. Germain is like the plot of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and all three Back To The Future movies combined, but it makes sense. If I somehow figured out time travel I would defo go back in time and just kinda hang out with every person of historical note and pop up at random historical events just to fuck with people in the present/future/my brain hurts.
It’s not clear what the Count of St. Germain actually did during his lifetime, but just watch this documentary and try to tell me you wouldn’t wanna be best buds with him.