From speculation that JFK's assassination was an "inside job" to claims that vaccines contain microchips, the world is awash with conspiracy theories. The term was coined in the 1860s, appearing in a letter in The New York Times that discussed British support during the Civil War.

Fast-forward 150 years, and conspiracy theories are more prevalent than ever, which can be put down to the rise of social media, the spread of disinformation and a number of psychological factors — including a need to make sense of the world.

But how much do you know about the wildest conspiracy theories? Test your knowledge on the Illuminati, faked moon landings, flat Earth and even more bizarre claims in our conspiracy theory quiz. Make sure you login to add your name to the leaderboard, and if you need a hint, tap the yellow button.

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Chances are, you know someone with a killer ghost story. You might even believe you've encountered a ghost yourself. However, considering there's no scientific evidence that ghosts exist, why do some people think they've seen or heard them?

Christopher French, a professor emeritus of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, recently wrote a book about the science of the paranormal and said ghost sightings are often "sincere misinterpretations of things that do have a natural explanation."

"Just because you can't think of an explanation doesn't mean there isn't one," French told Live Science.

French is a skeptic who explores non-paranormal explanations for ghostly encounters. These explanations include hallucinations, or perceptions of things that aren't there; false memories, or recollections of events that didn't happen; and pareidolia, or the tendency to see a face or something significant in an inanimate object or random pattern.

The human brain is prone to missing things and misremembering events, and it can jump to conclusions when trying to understand an ambiguous experience. This is especially true when a person wants to believe they've seen a ghost or another legendary creature, Live Science previously reported.

Related: Are ghosts real?

There are also some medical conditions that make perceived ghostly encounters more likely. One area of study for French is a disorder called sleep paralysis, in which people think they've fully woken up but are unable to move, often while sensing an evil presence.

"It's as if your mind wakes up, but your body doesn't," French said. "You've got this interesting mix of normal waking consciousness and dream consciousness, and the contents of the dream are coming through into waking consciousness. The results can be absolutely terrifying."

French noted that if someone gets sleep paralysis without having any prior knowledge of the disorder, then it's not irrational for that person to assume they've had a supernatural experience. However, even during sleep paralysis, when humans are at the mercy of their dreams, the presence people encounter is often a shadowy figure in the corner of the room.

Movies depict ghosts as full-bodied translucent humans, but these kinds of sightings make up only a small minority of perceived paranormal reports. Johannes Dillinger, a professor of early modern history at Oxford Brookes University in the U.K. is working on understanding the types of ghosts people have believed in over the centuries in Western society and culture. He said that the most commonly reported haunting is an unseen poltergeist.

"Many, many ghosts over the centuries were mere poltergeists, meaning they remained invisible throughout," Dillinger told Live Science. "We only think they are there because we hear strange noises, usually at night, that are difficult to explain."

Dillinger found that prior to 1800, people believed that ghosts had important unfinished business, but in a much more literal sense than we might think of today. "Ghosts usually wanted people to find their treasures and put them to some good use," Dillinger said.

Perceived ghosts have become more personal since then. The 19th century marked the rise of spiritualism and a belief that humans could communicate with ghosts and spirits, according to the Science History Institute, a nonprofit that promotes the history of science.

Dillinger noted that people's beliefs changed from ghosts demanding things of the living to the living expecting to be consoled or comforted by the dead. However, throughout all of this, ghosts have remained, above all else, an explanation that people readily accept for strange noises in the dark.

"The ghost is really that thing that goes bump in the night," Dillinger said.

A search for the Yeti ended last month with a single strand of horse hair, a BBC Radio 4 program covering the Himalayan hunt has revealed.

Andrew Benfield, a writer and meditation teacher, has spent years looking for the Yeti with his skeptical friend and political analyst Richard Horsey. The pair traveled through India, Myanmar, Nepal and Bhutan, listening to stories about the legendary creature and eventually making "Yeti," a BBC Radio 4 series about their search.

The series finished on a cliffhanger in June — a mysterious hair supplied by an unnamed source awaiting DNA analysis. A bonus episode published Oct. 20 has now revealed the hair came from a horse.

Benfield told Live Science the result "didn't feel good" after three years of searching. "A horse was about as boring as we could get," Benfield said. But the DNA analysis doesn't invalidate the series or the stories of the people they spoke to, according to the pair.

Related: The most famous Bigfoot sightings

Tales of an ape-like creature roaming the Himalayas date back centuries. Western interest in the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman, took off in the early 1950s after British mountaineer Eric Shipton returned from Everest with photos of giant footprints. Subsequent investigations led by westerners failed to find any scientific evidence of the creature's existence.

Having worked in international development, Benfield didn't like that local accounts of the Yeti were dismissed just because white explorers hadn't found one. He was also reassured by a Sir David Attenborough interview filmed in 2013, in which Attenborough said he thinks "there might be something in the Abominable Snowman mystery." Attenborough doesn't take part in the new radio series.

Benfield set out in 2019 to hear first-hand stories of the Yeti and invited Horsey, who has a PhD in cognitive psychology, to join him. "If I could convince him, I knew I was on to something," Benfield said.

The BBC became involved in 2022, just before the duo headed to Bhutan and the Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary, a 286-square-mile (740 square-kilometer) national park established, in part, to protect the "Migoi," or Yeti, according to the Daily Bhutan. Here, Horsey finally gets a story that shakes his skepticism, and Benfield acquires the purported Yeti hair.

The hair was about 6 inches (15 centimeters) long. Benfield cut it in half and sent piece to Charlotte Lindqvist, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo in New York. Lindqvist and her team found the DNA matched Altai horses, a mountain breed from Asia.

Lindqvist was also part of a 2017 study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B that analyzed nine purported Yeti samples and found eight came from bears and one came from a dog. She has previously said that she has no doubt the creature is a myth.

Benfield accepts the DNA results but still hasn't parted with the other half of the hair, which he told Live Science is currently in his cupboard. He also spoke of the vast, untouched, unexplored nature of the Himalayas and said Yeti stories come from people who know the region.

"You certainly respect local people's knowledge when you're up there because they're keeping you alive," Benfield said. "Who am I to question these people? They're out there every day."

Horsey didn't think they'd come back with DNA evidence, but told Live Science the Yeti is more important to local people than he'd ever imagined. "We realized it doesn't really matter to most of these people whether it physically exists," Horsey said. "It's the role that it plays in their world."

Writer Tshering Tashi detailed Bhutanese belief in the Yeti in a 2020 article for Kuensel Online, the web edition of Bhutan's national newspaper. In it, he said that people in Bhutan are convinced that the Yeti exists but are in "no hurry" to produce evidence.

"While there is certainly a biological being behind the mythology, we believe that it will not be in the shape and form that Westerners have romanticised it to be," Tashi wrote.

A mysterious, malevolent-looking mermaid mummy that was brought back to the U.S. from Japan more than 100 years ago appears to be a mix of fish, monkey and lizard parts that have been joined together like Frankenstein's monster, initial scans suggest. 

The haunting mummy, which is around 11.5 inches (29 centimeters) long, is known as the "Fiji mermaid" due to its similarities with an object of the same name supposedly acquired from Fiji by controversial showman P.T. Barnum in the 1840s. The mummy was purchased in Japan by an American naval officer who donated it to the Clark County Historical Society in Springfield, Ohio, in 1906. Documents supplied to the society with the mummy suggest it dates back to the mid-1800s.

Now, for the first time, researchers have investigated the mermaid's identity by carrying out X-ray and CT scans on the disheveled remains.

"This allowed us to see [the mummy] in almost every dimension in the hopes to see what was inside it," project leader Joseph Cress, a radiographer at Northern Kentucky University, told Live Science. 

Related: Are there any mythological creatures that haven't been debunked? 

The initial investigation found that the mummy appears to be made from the head and torso of a monkey sewed onto the decapitated body of a fish, while the mermaid's hands are the clawed legs from a lizard — most likely a Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis), Cress told Live Science.

The scans also revealed a pair of wooden stakes inside the remains — one running from head to tail and another across the shoulder blades — which were presumably added to keep the creature intact, Cress said.

The researchers are currently trying to reconstruct a more detailed model of the mermaid and its individual parts from their scans. Once the models are complete, the team plans to send them to zoos and aquariums to help identify the components on a species level.

This is not the only mummified mermaid to have undergone intensive scans recently. 

In March 2022, researchers analyzed a similar specimen that was unearthed in a hidden box in a Japanese temple. Researchers initially expected that this mermaid, which was 12 inches (30.5 cm) long and dates to the mid-1700s, was also a monkey-fish hybrid. But subsequent scans this February revealed that the mummy was predominantly made from cloth, paper and cotton, painted with sand and charcoal and held together by metal pins. Various animal parts, including mammal hair and fish skin, were stuck to the outside of the doll. 

Both mermaids most closely resemble "ningyo" — mythical fish-like creatures with human heads. In Japanese mythology, a woman is fabled to have lived for 800 years after eating one of these fictional beasts, and so the creatures became a symbol of longevity. It is therefore likely that fishers made the cryptid concoctions to sell them to wealthy people seeking to prolong their lives, Live Science previously reported. 

Hundreds of monster hunters will descend on Loch Ness this weekend for what organizers claim is the biggest Nessie search in more than 50 years — but don't expect a monster discovery. 

The Loch Ness Centre, a visitor attraction in Scotland, announced earlier this month that it was "looking for budding monster hunters" to help search Loch Ness on Aug. 26 and Aug. 27 in what it's calling a "giant surface watch." 

A spokesperson for the Loch Ness Centre told Live Science that more than 200 people have signed up to attend the search in person, while over a hundred more plan to take part virtually. The center promises this search will be "the biggest of its kind" since a group called the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau last studied the loch in 1972. However, scientific research suggests there's nothing monstrous lurking beneath the waves. 

A scientific survey of Loch Ness DNA in 2019 found no traces of "monster DNA" to support the legend. The researchers did, however, find a lot of eel DNA and couldn't rule out a theory that overgrown eels are responsible for sightings. Loch Ness is also low in nutrients and unlikely to support a large unknown predator species like a massive ancient reptile, Live Science previously reported. 

Related: No, the Loch Ness Monster was not a whale's penis 

The Loch Ness Monster legend dates back many centuries, but this year marks the 90th anniversary of a famous Nessie sighting from 1933. Aldie MacKay, manager of the then Drumnadrochit Hotel — now the Loch Ness Centre site — helped ignite the modern Nessie craze after reporting seeing a "whale-like fish" or "water beast" in the loch.

Despite no hard evidence for the fabled monster's existence, Nessie became famous the world over, and the loch remains a popular tourist destination. This weekend, the Loch Ness Centre will host various activities as part of their search, including operating 90-minute-long "Premium Deepscan Cruises," where paying customers can join Nessie hunters using a hydrophone to "listen for noises in the depths of the loch," according to the announcement statement. 

The visitor center claims it will also have surveying equipment not used on the loch before, including flying thermal drones equipped with infrared cameras to detect heat in the water. Meanwhile, surface watch volunteers will be asked to look out for "breaks in the water and any inexplicable movements," according to the statement. While in-person volunteering is now fully booked, people can still join the search from home by logging onto a live stream of the loch.   

"The weekend gives an opportunity to search the waters in a way that has never been done before, and we can’t wait to see what we find," Paul Nixon, the Loch Ness Centre general manager, said in the statement. 

Debunking conspiracy theories with counterarguments is often a fruitless effort — but according to a new scientific review, there may be alternative strategies that can successfully fend off conspiratorial beliefs.

Having already grown over the past 10 years, interest in conspiracy theories skyrocketed during the pandemic, when failure to comply with public health recommendations was sometimes associated with conspiracy beliefs. For example, proponents of the anti-vax movement may avoid vaccinations for themselves or their children on the basis that some hazardous outcome of vaccination is being covered up. Although increasingly prominent in public discourse, conspiracy theories have proved a difficult mindset to shift.

"I wouldn't have a Ph.D. in this project if conspiracy theories were easy to counteract," said Cian O'Mahony, a doctoral candidate in psychology at University College Cork in Ireland who led the systematic review reported in the journal PLOS One. The review doesn't reveal "a silver bullet" for countering conspiracy theories, he said, but "we have found some interesting avenues for future research that we should follow up."

The review is the first of its kind, as previous studies have been more concerned with understanding the psychological underpinnings of conspiracy beliefs, O'Mahony told Live Science. Research into designing interventions to combat conspiracy is still relatively new. "When we did the review, we found that there's only a handful of papers that are actually published on this topic," he said. 

Related: Belief that COVID-19 was a hoax is a gateway drug to other conspiracy theories

O'Mahony described a conspiracy theory as "a belief that explains events by invoking malicious groups working in secret." The role of some underground organization distinguishes conspiracy theories from general misinformation and "fake news." For instance, the statement "Bigfoot exists" would not be a conspiracy theory unless qualified by adding "and a particular organization is trying to keep it a secret."

The new review suggested that many methods for changing conspiracy beliefs are ineffective — particularly those that involve straightforwardly arguing against a person's beliefs after they're already entrenched. However, the review also highlighted some emerging practices that might be successfully wielded against conspiracy theories.      

The most promising was training to teach people how to critically analyze information to distinguish pseudoscience from the real thing. However, even generic "analytically priming" a study participant's mental state to be more alert — by presenting them with text in a hard-to-read font, for example — was found to reduce the likelihood of falling for a conspiracy theory they saw shortly afterward. 

Finally, "information inoculation" can also be effective. In this strategy, conspiracy theory counterarguments are presented alongside a warning that exposure to misinformation is to follow, before the subject is exposed to the theory. It is likened to the way a vaccine exposes someone to a fragment or weakened form of a virus so that they are resistant to the disease when they encounter it. 

(Unfortunately, this same approach can also be used to spread conspiracy, if someone "inoculates" with a conspiratorial explanation first, O'Mahony noted.)

"While it is not overly optimistic, this review points out several potentially promising" lines of research, Iris Žeželj, a professor of social psychology at the University of Belgrade who was not involved in the new review, said in an email. 

However, she highlighted the need to replicate the studies demonstrating successful intervention, as well as the challenge of scaling them up into policies. O'Mahony noted these same caveats and also pointed out the current lack of evidence that any of these interventions have a lasting impact.

Valerie van Mulukom, a researcher at the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations at Coventry University in the U.K. who was not involved with the review, described it as a "timely endeavour" but emphasized that it is important to consider the spread of conspiracy beliefs as a social process.      

"Interventions may decrease belief in certain conspiracy theories by pointing out issues in the information presented, but they do not take away the social causes underlying belief," she said in an email. Factors like people's personalities, paranoias, need for closure, financial insecurities and feelings of marginalization may all  influence what conspiracies they ascribe to and what interventions work on them.

"It is not the case that everyone with lower levels of analytical or scientific reasoning believes in conspiracy theories," van Mulukom noted.   

As a follow-up to their review, O'Mahony and his colleagues are developing a video game aimed at honing players' critical thinking skills. Such games have already been shown to be effective in combating fake news. 

"This might sound a little avant-garde, but we're finding that this is a potentially promising avenue for teaching people to apply critical thinking skills to conspiracy theories," he said.

Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, is one of North America's most enduring legends. The scientific community largely dismisses the idea of a large, unknown ape-like creature sauntering through the forests because there's never been any hard evidence that such an animal exists. 

Nonetheless, there have been thousands of reported eyewitness accounts over the last half century from people all over the U.S. and Canada. Here are some of the most famous Bigfoot sightings.

William Roe encounter: 1955

One of the most famous Bigfoot sightings allegedly occurred on Mica Mountain in British Columbia in 1955, when a man called William Roe claimed he saw a "partly human and partly animal" creature while hiking. He swore an affidavit in 1957 that the creature was about 6 feet (1.8 meters) tall and covered in brown silver-tipped hair, with thick arms reaching down to its knees, broad feet and breasts, according to the Alberta Sasquatch Organization website. 

"As I watched this creature, I wondered if some movie company was making a film at this place and that what I saw was an actor, made up to look partly human and partly animal." Roe wrote in his 1957 affidavit. "But as I observed it more, I decided it would be impossible to fake such a specimen." 

According to "Abominable Science! Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids" (Columbia University Press, 2013), Roe's ape-like sighting marks a change from earlier Sasquatch accounts in British Columbia, which repeatedly described Sasquatch as a giant-sized Indigenous person. In other words, it was the birth of modern Bigfoot — though that name wouldn't emerge for another year. Scientists argue that eyewitness testimony isn't always reliable, so this and other sightings are not conclusive evidence.

Related: 'Expedition Bigfoot' scours Oregon woods for signs of the mythical and elusive beast 

Albert Ostman abduction: 1924

Prospector Albert Ostman claimed that he spent around a week with a Bigfoot family near Toba Inlet, British Columbia in 1924. Ostman was camping alone when he says he was scooped up in his sleeping bag by a papa Bigfoot and taken to meet momma Bigfoot and two Bigfoot children. Ostman was supposedly held captive by the family, but said he eventually escaped when papa Bigfoot ate Ostman’s chewing tobacco and fell ill, according to a retelling of the story in anthropologist David Daegling's book "Bigfoot Exposed: An Anthropologist Examines America's Enduring Legend" (AltaMira Press, 2004). 

Ostman's descriptions of his captors are similar to that of Roe's 1957 account. However, Daegling points out in his book that even though Ostman said the encounter took place in 1924, he didn't write it down until 1957, after he heard Roe's tale, so he may have been inspired or influenced by Roe.

Patterson-Gimlin film: 1967

What is likely the most famous Bigfoot sighting was caught on camera in 1967. The "Patterson-Gimlin film" is a minute-long video that appears to show a female Bigfoot — later nicknamed "Patty" — walking through a clearing in Northern California. The film is still often held up by Bigfoot believers as the best piece of evidence for the creature's existence. The scientific community has overwhelmingly dismissed the film as showing a person wearing a costume. 

Jeffrey Meldrum, a professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University and author of "Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science" (Forge Books, 2007), is one of the few scientists to publicly back the film and the existence of Bigfoot. Meldrum told Live Science that not only is he convinced the film is real but believes it's grown more credible over time. The creature's walk was criticized in the 1960s for being too human, but Meldrum argues that subsequent scientific discoveries, such as Lucy — an extinct, 3.2 million-year-old human ancestor (Australopithecus afarensis) — reveal our ape-like ancestors walked upright, so there's now a scientific justification for the creature’s human-like gait. 

"What you see on that film is exactly how we envision something like a robust Australopithecine to look," Meldrum said. "It's almost as if now the science has finally caught up to this whole phenomenon of Bigfoot."

Meldrum noted that anatomical features visible on the film, such as the proportions of the face, match up with early humans such as Paranthropus boisei — a species that lived around 2.3 million years ago to 1.2 million years ago, according to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. The size of the creature in the film is estimated to be between around 6 feet to 7 feet (1.8 to 2.1 m) tall. 

Related: Closest living relative of extinct 'Bigfoot' found

However, most experts are not convinced by the footage. Darren Naish, a paleozoologist and author of "Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths" (Sirius, 2017) summarized plenty of reasons to question the film's authenticity in a 2020 Twitter thread. Most notably, he highlights that Patterson, who shot the film, had already turned Bigfoot into a money-spinning operation before releasing it. But Naish adds that Patty's pelt appears to glisten and move like that of a real animal and her muscle movements look genuine — suggesting it's a very good hoax. 

Brian Regal, an associate professor of the history of science at Kean University in New Jersey and author of "Searching for Sasquatch: Crackpots, Eggheads, and Cryptozoology" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), is more damning of the film and told Live Science that people project their own views onto Patty. "You look at it and you see what you want to believe," he said.

Ape Canyon: 1924

The Ape Canyon incident of 1924 wasn't so much an alleged sighting as a supposed battle. A group of gold prospectors claimed they defended their cabin against multiple "gorilla men" in a gorge — later named Ape Canyon — on the side of Mount St. Helens. One of the miners, Fred Beck, allegedly shot at a Sasquatch during the day, which prompted a gang of its hairy brethren to seek revenge come nightfall. The creatures are said to have pelted the miners' cabin with rocks and boulders, and one even reached an arm inside. The miners survived the onslaught, and as the sun rose the beasts retreated back into the woods, possibly after Beck shot one. 

Beck returned to the scene with U.S. Forest Service rangers after news broke of the attack. The rangers couldn't find a Sasquatch body and apparently weren't impressed with the large stones they found next to the cabin or the supposed giant footprints nearby, the local The Oregonian newspaper reported at the time. The rangers seemed to think the miners placed the stones there themselves and that the footprints were made by a human hand. 

One popular explanation for the Ape Canyon story put forward by skeptics — other than the miners simply making it up — is that the miners were actually set upon by a gang of local youths throwing rocks at the cabin for fun, according to travel website Atlas Obscura — although this doesn't account for all aspects of the story. 

Related: Bigfoot's FBI file reveals strange story of a monster hunter and 15 mysterious hairs

Scott Tompkins, a data manager and founder of the Bigfoot Mapping Project — a website that hosts around 8,000 historical and modern Bigfoot sightings — told Live Science that most Bigfoot sightings he's mapped don't end in conflict. 

"When people describe the behavior [of such creatures], they seem to be very curious, but non confrontational," Tompkins said.

Provo Canyon: 2012

There are many Bigfoot videos on YouTube, but few are as popular as a clip from Provo Canyon, Utah. The video appears to show a large, black animal hunched over in the trees, possibly feeding or foraging. The camera zooms in to try to get a closer look, and a few seconds later the great creature stands up on two legs as if it's bipedal. This causes the pair behind the camera to immediately turn and run away. 

The video was posted on Oct. 30, 2012 and has amassed more than 7.6 million views on YouTube. According to account uploader "Beard Card," the pair were on a camping trip hoping to get a closer look at deer on a hill. "On our way up, we thought we saw a bear, until the monster stood up and looked right at us," Beard Card wrote in the video description. "We ran straight to the car after that, leaving our tent and everything behind. It's probably all still up there."

The Provo Canyon video is short and inconclusive. Eric Rickart, curator of vertebrate zoology at the Natural History Museum of Utah, told FOX 13 News Utah after a more recent alleged sighting in 2019 that the science didn't support a Bigfoot in the state. 

"What’s the likelihood that there are big animals that have gone undetected by scientists and by trained observers?" Rickart said. "There are lots of things to discover, particularly in the natural world, but they don’t take the form of giant apes running around in largely settled areas of the world." 

Related: Maybe Bigfoot was a dinosaur, if these fossils are any Indication

Highcliff skunk ape: 2013

Skunk apes are supposedly swamp-dwelling versions of Bigfoot that are rumored to roam the southeastern U.S. On Oct. 28, 2013, a YouTube account named "Josh Highcliff'' uploaded one of the most popular skunk ape videos. In it, the cameraman films a potential skunk ape foraging in a Mississippi swamp. 

"It looks like a gorilla squatted down, big broad shoulders, little peaked head and it's pulling off chunks of wood that seems to demonstrate extreme strength. Then, all of a sudden it stands up and it's got these long legs," Meldrum said, impressed by the video but yet to examine it in detail. 

The last shot of the creature in the video comes just as it stands up, similar to the 2012 Provo Canyon video. Unfortunately, people filming Bigfoot have a tendency to suddenly jerk the camera and run away just as they're about to get a good view of one — understandably fearful if the creature exists, but convenient if they're creating a hoax. This is one of many reasons why skeptics decry such videos and ask believers to produce a body.

Hoax bodies: 2008 and 2012

In 2008, two men, Rick Dyer and Matthew Whitton, claimed to possess a frozen body of a Bigfoot specimen. They said they found it while hiking in the woods in northern Georgia. Their story made headlines, but the "body" turned out to be a rubber gorilla suit, Reuters reported at the time. Dyer was in the news again in 2012 when he claimed to have shot another Bigfoot in San Antonio, Texas. He took this second "Bigfoot" on tour in 2014 and charged people to see it, before admitting it was fake, San Antonio Express-News reported at the time.

Bigfoot footprints

While not a sighting per se, Bigfoot footprints are among the most commonly reported aspects of the Bigfoot phenomenon. Even the name "Bigfoot" stems from a seemingly bogus 1958 story about giant footprints in northern California found by a man called Ray Wallace; his children later claimed that the prints were their father's prank, according to Smithsonian Magazine. Meldrum argues that hoaxers are rare and that he's got plenty of legitimate footprints that back up the masses of sightings.  

"I've got over 300 footprint cast copies and original materials in my laboratory that form the basis of a remarkable body of data that attests to the fact that there is something out there leaving these footprints." Meldrum said. "And the most straightforward answer is that it's a bipedal primate species that's not recognized by science." 

Skeptics, however, will wait for a body.

Worldwide, more than four in 10 people believe in witchcraft, a new survey suggests.

However, witchcraft, or the concept that people can use supernatural abilities to cause harm is a belief that varies dramatically between nations. Just 9% of people in Sweden believe in witchcraft, while more than 90% of people in Tunisia believe some people hold malevolent powers, the study found. 

Belief in witchcraft may be as old as humanity itself. England's oldest cave art, for instance, may be "witch marks" etched to ward off evil spirits, while the oldest written instance of the Hebrew name of God is found on a 3,200-year-old "curse tablet," meant to hex someone who broke a vow. The notion that humans can cast curses is present in most major world religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism, a 2021 Pew Research Center survey found.

Related: Sacred chickens, witches and animal entrails: 7 unusual Roman superstitions

In the new study, researchers used a vast dataset collected over six waves between 2008 and 2017 by the Pew Research Center. Overall, 140,000 people across 95 countries and five continents were asked a series of questions related to their belief in magic, such as, "Do you believe in the evil eye, or that certain people can cast curses or spells that cause bad things to happen to someone?" (One glaring limitation of the study: it did not survey anyone in India or China, which collectively are home to roughly 2.8 billion people.) 

Based on the Pew sample, the researchers estimated that at least 1 billion people worldwide believe in witchcraft. Women, urban residents and younger people were more likely to believe in such supernatural powers. However, having more education, more financial security, and living in a smaller household typically accompanied a reduced  belief in witchcraft. Still, such beliefs were nonetheless found in people across the educational and socioeconomic spectrum. 

For instance, people with a "very good" economic situation were only 6% to 7% less likely to believe in witchcraft than people with "very bad" economic situations, according to the study, which was published Nov. 23 in the journal PLOS One.

And unsurprisingly, those who were religious tended to be more likely to believe that some humans possess magical powers.

"Overall, religious and witchcraft beliefs, both centered on the key role of supernatural powers in life, go hand in hand," the researchers wrote in the study.

Related: Were any witches burned at Salem?

People in countries with weak institutions, low levels of social trust, greater emphasis on conformity and greater bias toward people in the "in group" were also more likely to believe in witchcraft. 

That aligns with past anthropological work studying American Indigenous people in the Navajo Nation, also known as the Diné, according to the new report. That prior research proposed that among Navajo people, belief in witchcraft served as a tool of social control that helps maintain order in a society when formal governance structures are absent or weak, the researchers wrote in the study.

Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, is a giant ape-like creature that some people believe roams North America. It is a cryptid (or species rumored to exist) and just like the Chupacabra or Loch Ness monster, there's scant physical evidence to suggest Bigfoot is actually out there. But that doesn't stop alleged sightings of the ape that never shows its face or Bigfoot buffs from trying to prove there's life in the legend, even if for the most part they are probably just black bears.

Most Bigfoot sightings occur in the Northwest, where the creature can be linked to Indigenous myths and legends. The word Sasquatch is derived from Sasq’ets, a word from the Halq’emeylem language used by some Salish First Nations peoples in southwestern British Columbia, according to the Oregon Encyclopedia. It means "wild man" or "hairy man." 

What started the Bigfoot phenomenon?

As early as 1884, the British Colonist newspaper in Victoria, Canada published an account of a “gorilla type” creature captured in the area. Other accounts, largely decried as hoaxes, followed, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia. Sasquatch book author John Green compiled a list of 1,340 sightings through the 19th and 20th centuries. But the modern Bigfoot or Sasquatch myth gained new life in the late 1950s. 

In 1958, the Humboldt Times, a local newspaper in Northern California, published a story about the discovery of giant, mysterious footprints near Bluff Creek, California. In the story, they referred to the creature that made them as “Bigfoot”, according to Smithsonian Magazine. Bigfoot curiosity grew rapidly during the second half of the 20th century, after an article in True magazine, published in December 1959, described the 1958 discovery.

The footprints near Bluff Creek were a prank by a man called Ray Wallace, his children revealed after his death in 2002,  according to Smithsonian Magazine. By that time, though, Bigfoot was firmly established in popular culture across the continent. Since the 1958 article was published, a wealth of other claims have been made about Sasquatch tracks, casts, photos, videos, and other "evidence."

Related: Infographic: Tracking belief in Bigfoot

Bigfoot sightings

There have been more than 10,000 eyewitness accounts of Bigfoot in the continental U.S. in the last 50 years, Live Science reported in 2019. In these accounts, Bigfoot is usually described as being about 8 to 10 feet (2.4 to 3 meters) tall and covered in hair. 

Eyewitness reports, or sightings, are the most common evidence put forward for the existence of Bigfoot. Unfortunately, these are based on human memories, and memories are not reliable, Live Science previously reported. In crime cases, for example, witnesses can be influenced by their emotions and may miss or distort important details. In the same vein, people also often overestimate their ability to remember things. When it comes to cryptids like Bigfoot, the human brain is capable of making up explanations for events it can't immediately interpret, and many people simply want to believe they exist, Live Science previously reported. 

Related: Real or not? The science behind 12 unusual sightings

Bigfoot video and photographs

The most famous Bigfoot video is a short film taken in 1967 by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, known as the "Patterson–Gimlin film," or "Patterson film." Shot in Bluff Creek, the video shows what appears to be a large and hairy bipedal ape, or Bigfoot, striding through a clearing. The video's authenticity is still debated but it was likely a hoax, with the ape-like figure just a human wearing a costume.

Brian Regal, an associate professor of the history of science at Kean University in New Jersey and author of "Searching for Sasquatch: Crackpots, Eggheads, and Cryptozoology" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), previously told Live Science that people project their own views onto Patty. "You look at it and you see what you want to believe," he said.

With the rise of high-quality cameras in smartphones, photographs of people, cars, mountains, flowers, sunsets, deer and more have gotten sharper and clearer over the years; Bigfoot is a notable exception. The logical explanation for this discrepancy is that the creatures don't exist, and that photographs of them are merely hoaxes or misidentifications.

Audio recordings

Some people claim to have heard Bigfoot shrieks, howls, growls, screams or other vocalizations. The creatures are also associated with other noises, such as wood-knocking, according to Scientific American. Strange noise recordings associated with Bigfoot occasionally attract media attention but the noises can often be attributed to known animals, such as foxes or coyotes. 

Experts can't always identify the exact animal in strange recordings that cryptozoologists, people who search for creatures rumored to exist, point to as Bigfoot evidence. In 2019, for example, a YouTube video of mysterious howls and screams in a forest in northwestern Ontario, Canada went viral, driving Bigfoot speculation. Jolanta Kowalski, Ontario’s Ministry of Resources and Forestry media relations officer, told Vice News at the time: “Our biologists say it could be a larger mammal–for example a wolf–but because it’s a considerable distance from the recorder there is no way to know for sure.”

The late anthropologist Grover Krantz investigated sound recordings claimed to be of Bigfoot for his book "Big Footprints: A Scientific Inquiry Into the Reality of Sasquatch" (Johnson Books, 1992). He listened to at least 10 tapes and found "no compelling reason to believe that any of them are what the recorders claimed them to be," Live Science previously reported.

Elusive hard evidence

There is no hard evidence for the existence of Bigfoot. Krantz, the anthropologist who investigated sound recordings, also discussed alleged Bigfoot hair, feces, skin scrapings and blood in his "Big Footprints" book. "The usual fate of these items is that they either receive no scientific study, or else the documentation of that study is either lost or unobtainable," he wrote. "In most cases where competent analyses have been made, the material turned out to be bogus or else no determination could be made." 

When alleged Bigfoot samples are subject to vigorous scientific analysis, they typically turn out to be from ordinary sources. For example, in 2014, a team of researchers led by the late geneticist Bryan Sykes from the University of Oxford in England, conducted genetic analysis on 36 hair samples claimed to belong to Bigfoot or the Yeti — a similar ape-like creature said to exist in the Himalayas. Almost all of the hairs turned out to be from known animals such as cows, raccoons, deer and humans. However, two of the samples closely matched an extinct Paleolithic polar bear, Live Science previously reported. These samples may have come from an unknown bear species or a hybrid of modern bears, but they were from a bear, not a primate. Similarly, a DNA analysis of a supposed "Yeti" hair documented on a 2023 BBC program turned out to come from a horse.

Related: Bigfoot's FBI file reveals strange story of a monster hunter and 15 mysterious hairs

The study of genetics provides another reason to doubt the existence of Bigfoot.  A single creature can't breed and maintain a population, much less a species. For Bigfoot to be viable, it would need to have a population, or populations, large enough to avoid inbreeding and low genetic diversity, or else face extinction.

The existence of multiple Bigfoot increases the chances that one would be killed by a hunter or hit by a motorist on a highway, or even found dead (by accident, disease, or old age) by a hiker or farmer at some point, yet no bodies have ever been found. People do occasionally claim to find bones or other large body parts. For example, a man in Utah discovered what he thought was a fossilized Bigfoot skull in 2013. A paleontologist confirmed that the "skull" was simply an oddly weathered rock, Live Science previously reported.  

Bigfoot hoaxes

Bigfoot hoaxers have further complicated the problem of sorting Sasquatch fact from fiction. Dozens of people have admitted or been found out to have faked  Bigfoot prints, photographs, and nearly every other type of Bigfoot evidence. One prominent example is Ray Wallace, whose family revealed he was responsible for the footprints near Bluff Creek in 1958. An even earlier example is the late Rant Mullens, who was a logger in Toledo, Washington. In 1982, he admitted to carving giant feet out of wood and using them to make fake tracks with the help of a friend in the 1920s, The Chronicle, a Washington newspaper, reported in 2007. This built on the legend of ape-like men decades before Wallace's footprints helped make Bigfoot a phenomenon. 

There are also 21st century examples of Bigfoot hoaxes. In 2008, two men from Georgia claimed to have a complete, frozen Bigfoot specimen that they found on a hike. Their Bigfoot turned out to be a gorilla costume, Reuters reported in 2008. 

Justin Humphrey, an Oklahoma lawmaker, proposed creating a Bigfoot hunting season in January, 2021, CNN reported. Humphrey suggested that the hunting season could coincide with an annual Bigfoot festival that takes place in Honobia, Oklahoma, and would help to bring more tourists to the area. Oklahoma tourism officials later announced a $2.1 million bounty in March for the capture of a live Bigfoot, NPR reported. 

Related: 'Expedition Bigfoot' scours Oregon woods for signs of the mythical and elusive beast 

The real Bigfoot

Scientific evidence for the existence of a modern-day Bigfoot may be proving elusive, but a giant, bipedal ape did once walk the Earth. A species named Gigantopithecus blacki was about 10 feet (3 m.) tall and weighed up to 595 pounds (270 kilograms), based on fossil evidence. However, Gigantopithecus lived in Southeast Asia, not North America, and went extinct hundreds of thousands of years ago. The extinct ape is also more closely related to modern orangutans than to humans or our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, Live Science previously reported.  

Additional resources

Many books about Bigfoot have been published. For a critical history of the Bigfoot phenomenon, check out "Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend" (University of Chicago Press, 2010). Another option is "Searching for Sasquatch: Crackpots, Eggheads, and Cryptozoology" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), which explores the relationship between professional scientists and cryptozoologists, as well as the nature of monster hunting in the late 20th century.  

The Times-Standard, a newspaper covering California's North Coast, looks at the reporting that sparked the Bigfoot phenomenon if you want to learn more about the origins of the contemporary myth. The University of California Berkeley's Cal Alumni Association offers great information on whether bigfoot is worthy of scientific analysis and whether science benefits from such monster hunts. 

Benjamin Radford is deputy editor of "Skeptical Inquirer" science magazine and author of six books, including "Tracking the Chupacabra" (University of New Mexico Press, 2011) and "Scientific Paranormal Investigation: How to Solve Unexplained Mysteries" (Rhombus Publishing Company, 2010). His website is www.BenjaminRadford.com.

Bibliography

Ashley P. Taylor, Live Science, "What is the most genetically diverse species?" April 24, 2021. https://www.livescience.com/most-genetically-diverse-species.html

Ben Crair, Smithsonian Magazine, "Why Do So Many People Still Want to Believe in Bigfoot?" Sep. 2018. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-so-many-people-still-believe-in-bigfoot-180970045/

Benjamin Radford, Live Science, "Bigfoot Blamed for Strange Shrieks," Jan. 29, 2013. https://www.livescience.com/26663-bigfoot-strange-sounds.html

Benjamin Radford, Live Science, "Bigfoot Hoaxer Killed in Accident," Aug. 28, 2012. https://www.livescience.com/22742-bigfoot-hoaxer-killed-in-accident.html

Grover Krantz, "Big Foot-Prints: A Scientific Inquiry into the Reality of Sasquatch," Johnson Books, 1992. https://www.amazon.com/Big-Foot-Prints-Scientific-Inquiry/dp/1555660991/

Ivan Sanderson, True magazine, "America's Abominable Snowman," Dec. 1959. https://www.flickr.com/photos/subtropicbob/16624964322

Karen Stollznow, Scientific American MIND Guest Blog, "(Big)foot in Mouth: Bigfoot Language," July 24, 2013. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/bigfoot-in-mouth-bigfoot-language/

Lauren M. Johnson, CNN, "Oklahoma lawmaker proposes a bill that calls for creation of a Bigfoot hunting season," Jan. 25, 2021. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/25/us/oklahoma-lawmaker-bigfoot-hunting-season-bill-trnd/index.html

Mindy Weisberger, Live Science, "Closest Living Relative of Extinct 'Bigfoot' Found," Nov. 13, 2019. https://www.livescience.com/gigantopithecus-bigfoot-orangutan-cousin.html

Mindy Weisberger, Live Science, "'Expedition Bigfoot' Scours Oregon Woods for Signs of the Mythical and Elusive Beast," Dec. 8, 2019. https://www.livescience.com/expedition-bigfoot-travel-channel.html

MJ Banias, Vice, News, "Viral Video Captures the Screams of a Mystery Creature," Nov. 12, 2019. https://www.vice.com/en/article/d3aqva/viral-video-captures-the-screams-of-a-mystery-creature

Nicki Thomas, The Canadian Encyclopedia, "Sasquatch," Jan. 21, 2007. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/sasquatch

Reuters Staff, Reuters, ""Bigfoot" was rubber gorilla costume," Aug. 20, 2008. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bigfoot-hoax/bigfoot-was-rubber-gorilla-costume-idUSN2035207920080820

Robert Roy Britt , Live Science, "Monsters, Ghosts and Gods: Why We Believe," Aug. 18, 2008. https://www.livescience.com/5046-monsters-ghosts-gods.html

Robert Roy Britt, Live Science, "'Skull' Claimed as Rock-Solid Evidence of Bigfoot," June 29, 2013. https://www.livescience.com/37858-skull-claimed-as-bigfoot-evidence.html

Robert Walls, The Oregon Encyclopedia, "Bigfoot (Sasquatch) legend," Jan. 22, 2021. https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/bigfoot_sasquatch_legend/

Scott Detrow (host), NPR, "Oklahoma Places $2.1 Million Bounty On Bigfoot's Head," March 9, 2021. https://www.npr.org/2021/03/09/975125841/oklahoma-places-2-1-million-bounty-on-bigfoots-head?t=1641994362302

Stephanie Pappas, Live Science, "Eyewitness Testimony Can Be Tragically Mistaken," Sep. 22, 2011. https://www.livescience.com/16194-crime-eyewitnesses-mistakes.html

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Tia Ghose, Live Science, "Sorry, That 'Bigfoot DNA' Came from a Raccoon," July 2, 2014. https://www.livescience.com/46631-bigfoot-samples-from-existing-animals.html

Crop circles are a very straightforward phenomenon: They are a type of landscape art made by humans.

Despite evidence to the contrary, some people remain convinced that crop circles were made by aliens brought by UFOs. 

But how did unidentified flying objects come to be linked with flattened expanses of cereal grains? And why have these designs historically been associated with southern England? 

The answer to all of these questions is simple: Doug Bower and Dave Chorley. 

Bower and Chorley were a pair of friends who lived near Winchester, England. In 1978, the two were sitting in a pub, "wondering what we could do for a bit of a laugh," Chorley told TIME magazine in 1991. Inspired by earlier reports of UFO landings — the UFO craze was well underway in the late 1970s, having gathered steam after a retired Air Force officer gave an interview about the Roswell incident, claiming that something extraterrestrial had crashed in the New Mexico desert in 1947 — Bower and Chorley decided to create their own faux UFO landing site. 

Arming themselves with some boards, rope and a twist of wire stuck to a baseball hat brim for siting their patterns, Bower and Chorley headed into a field and started creating a masterpiece. No one noticed. In fact, the two had to make multiple forays into the southern English countryside over several years before their newly invented crop circles were noticed by the global media. Once the story went global, and UFO enthusiasts began to show up in droves, the artists came forward and admitted their hoax. 

Related: Top conspiracy theories

Since then, crop circles have become both a landscape art form and a tourist attraction. Their cachet as extraterrestrial artifacts is no longer as strong as it once was, though true believers, nicknamed "croppies," still think aliens are responsible for at least some crop circles. These days, marketers are a more likely culprit — crop circles have been used to advertise the Olympics and computer chips.  

What are crop circles?

Crop circles are large-scale patterns made by flattening crops such as wheat, barley or canola. Crop circle artists still use boards of wood to stomp out patterns, as a National Geographic documentary filmed in 2004 illustrated. The artists hide their tracks in existing tractor-tire ruts, making it seem as if the design dropped out of the sky. 

Crop circles can be simple circles or more complex patterns. Southern England remains a hotspot for crop circle artists, with masterpieces incorporating triangles, spinner shapes and crescents. They've also popped up elsewhere around the world, with one article in the Illinois newspaper Courier & Press calling them a "plague" in the state in the 1990s. ("We think it's probably just kids," Rock Island County Sheriff Tod VanWolvelaere told the paper decades later.) 

Sometimes, "crop circles" appear for apparently natural reasons. The crop circles that Chorley and Bower took their inspiration from were found in Australia in 1966, though they weren't actually crops; they were patches of flattened, floating reeds in a lagoon in far north Queensland. The farmer who found them  claimed to have seen a flying saucer whizzing away, but locals said such circles were common during the wet season. According to the Cairns Post, the most likely explanations were downdrafts of wind or small vortices known as willy-willies (similar to dust devils).   

Famous crop circles

The first report of a crop-related mystery now linked to crop circles was a woodcut chapbook, or small book containing ballads and poems and tracts, called "The Mowing Devil," dating back to 1678. According to Oxford Reference, this chapbook tells the tale of a cheap farmer who refused to pay a laborer to cut his oats. Overnight, the devil did the job instead, "cutting them in round circles." Though the oats of the story were mowed, not flattened, crop circle believers used this fable to bolster their case for crop circles' long-ago roots. 

In 1996, a famous crop circle known as the "Julia set" appeared near Stonehenge. A local pilot claimed that he flew over the field an hour before the crop circle appeared and saw nothing, and then flew over it again, only to see a spiral of progressively larger circles, according to the Skeptical Inquirer. This supposed sudden appearance raised excitement that the crop circle had to be of paranormal origin. But according to the Skeptical Inquirer, these eyewitness accounts were sketchy — and a local crop-circle creator claimed to know who made the Julia set and that it had been done the night before the crop circle was spotted, not during broad daylight. 

Perhaps the cutest crop circles to make international news were simple ones spotted in Tasmania's legally grown opium field in 2009. The opium is grown for the pharmaceutical industry, which uses the plants to make drugs such as morphine. According to the Australian state's attorney general, wallabies were getting into the fields and hopping in circles after eating the opium poppies and "getting high as a kite," NBC News reported that year. The disoriented wallabies were stomping on the poppies, causing crushed circular patches. 

Additional resources

Crop circles are human-made, but they're still visually stunning. Smithsonian Magazine's The Art of the Crop Circle delves into the history and artistic merit of these structures. National Geographic's 2018 article "Inside the mystical world of crop circle tourism" looks at the travel spurred by crop circles. For documentation of southern England's crop circle art, the website Temporary Temples offers stunning aerial photos and context.  

Satan is often shown in popular depictions with horns on its head, furry legs and cloven hooves of a goat.

But just why is the devil depicted with horns and hooves?

It turns out that historians don’t agree on when this depiction of the devil became popular and where it came from.

The devil’s appearance is not described in the bible, Marina Montesano, a professor of Medieval History at Italy’s university of Messina, wrote for National Geographic. 

He was later identified with the serpent or snake in the Garden of Eden who persuaded Eve to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil; but there’s no mention of his horns and hooves anywhere in the bible. And for the most part, the goatlike depiction doesn't show up in medieval or even Renaissance images of the devil. But by the 19th century, the idea of a horned devil with cloven hooves was firmly established.

Related: What does the devil look like? Historical depictions of Satan

Changing portrayals

Early depictions of the devil don’t show him with horns and hooves.

For instance, the devil is a blue angel in a 6th century mosaic at the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy. Later he’s identified as "the beast," and he’s often portrayed as a dragon; a 15th century painting of Saint Augustine (or maybe Saint Wolfgang) confronting the devil depicts him as a dragon-like creature with bat-like wings.

But then there’s Pan. In Greek mythology Pan was the god of the wild, shepherds, and flocks; and he was usually shown in the form of a faun or satyr with the hind-legs, hooves, and horns. 

Early Christian writers labeled Pan as a demon in their quest to persuade people to forsake polytheism in favor of the newer religion.

But Pan wasn’t especially important in the classical pantheon, and his classification as just another demon doesn’t explain why the foremost of demons — Satan — looks like a satyr.

"Satyr-like" demons

Some historians suggest that age-old associations of goats with the underworld accounts for modern depictions of the devil with a goat’s horns and hooves.

For example, the demon Azazel may be linked in Jewish legend to the ritual of "scapegoating," in which a goat cursed with the sins of the Jewish people is sent out into the wilderness on Yom Kippur, the "Day of Atonement."

In a 2013 study in the journal Numen, Hebrew university historian Alexander Kulik argued that the portrayal of the devil with horns and hooves originated in early Jewish literature and can be seen in "The Greek Apocalypse of Baruch”, a text written in Greek between the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 and the third century.

The text described a demonic race with the hind-quarters of donkeys, claiming they constructed the lowest levels of the Tower of Babel; and Kulik argues this passage shows the notion of "satyr-like" demons existed in Jewish thought at the time.

That description, Kulik argues, might have influenced later Christian portrayals of the devil as a satyr, possibly through Christian authors who studied Jewish texts, like the fifth century scholar Saint Jerome.

Ronald Hutton, a historian at the University of Bristol in the U.K., however, suggested that horned devil depictions originate much later than that.

He argued that the devil became associated with Pan only two centuries ago, during a Neo-Pagan revival in Europe that sought to challenge the predominant Christian beliefs.The movement included a literary "Cult of Pan,", that united a romantic view of nature with the ancient Greek god; and that has led to the modern identification of Pan with the devil, Hutton told Live Science in an email.

"The transition to a staple modern image of goat horns and feet and goatee beard is nineteenth-century, and does seem to derive from the contemporary literary and artistic cult of Pan, as god of the increasingly-valued countryside," he said.

Editor's Note: This story was updated at 9:20 a.m. E.S.T. to note that Saint Jerome lived during the fifth century, not the eighth century.

Conspiracy. Just saying the word in conversation can make people politely edge away, looking for someone who won't corner them with wild theories about how Elvis, John F. Kennedy and Bigfoot are cryogenically frozen in an underground bunker.

Conspiracies are sometimes real. The Watergate break-in is a good example of a political conspiracy that actually happened. But thanks to the social-media algorithms that push users toward ever-more-emotional, conspiratorial content, it's probably never been easier for false conspiracy theories to spread.

All conspiracy theories must have certain necessary elements: a conspiracy between two or more people, a secret action, and a motive, said Karen Douglas, a professor of social psychology at the University of Kent in the U.K. But the ones that take off usually have something extra.

"Conspiracy theories are likely to be more successful when they confirm what people want to believe. They are also likely to be successful if they are interesting/exciting and offer a 'big' explanation for a 'big' event," Douglas told Live Science in an email.

Related: Why do people believe in conspiracy theories?

The top conspiracy theories are often very difficult to dislodge. In part, that's because they fulfill a psychological need, Douglas said. That may be the social need to feel good about the group they belong to, the need to know the truth and have certainty, or the existential need to feel safe or feel a sense of control over what happens to us.

And hardcore believers are adept at rationalizing away evidence that contradicts their beliefs. Eyewitnesses who dispute the conclusions of even the biggest conspiracy theories are mistaken, according to believers — or part of the conspiracy.

The truth, however, is out there …

The dead internet conspiracy theory

The dead internet theory first surfaced on the Agora Road's Macintosh Cafe forum in 2021, when a user started a thread called "Dead Internet Theory: Most Of The Internet Is Fake." Citing posts from major online discussion forums like 4Chan, the theory claimed that non-human bots are responsible for almost all online activity and content creation.

At a top level, the concept is that artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots automatically churn out social media posts designed to farm clicks, comments and likes on platforms like Facebook and TikTok. They do this because more engagement leads to more advertising dollars.

But the accounts responding to those automatic posts are in turn bots and AI agents, the conspiracy claims. In other words, everything is happening between machines, no humans needed. Go deeper down the rabbit hole, and some dead internet proponents argue that government organizations use these bots to manipulate human opinions.

Proponents argue the internet died around 2016 or 2017 — we just didn't know it back then.

This conspiracy theory has a little kernel of truth at its core: bots account for around half of all internet traffic, research suggests. That said, there are definitely humans on the internet.

The 9/11 Conspiracies

The evidence is overwhelming that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were indeed the result of a conspiracy: a conspiracy of Osama bin Laden and a crew of mostly Saudi hijackers.

This is too simple for some, though. Conspiracy theorists have a variety of much more complex explanations for what happened at the World Trade Center and Pentagon that day, often involving insider knowledge by President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and top Bush advisors.

Some famous conspiracy theories rely on anti-Semitic tropes, such as the attacks being orchestrated by Israel. Many claim that because "jet fuel can't melt steel beams," the Twin Towers must have been brought down by controlled demolition from bombs planted before the planes hit. (A 2006 NOVA documentary debunked these claims. It is, in fact, quite possible for the columns holding up skyscrapers to fail catastrophically when exposed to fires burning on multiple floors.)

Other claims are refuted by simple logic: If a hijacked airplane did not crash into the Pentagon, as is often claimed, then where is Flight 77 and its passengers? In many conspiracy theories, bureaucratic incompetence is often mistaken for conspiracy. Our government is so efficient, knowledgeable and capable — so the reasoning goes — that it could not possibly have botched the job so badly in detecting the plot ahead of time or responding to the attacks.

Princess Diana's murder

Within hours of Princess Diana's death on Aug. 31, 1997, in a Paris highway tunnel, conspiracy theories swirled. As was the case with the death of John F. Kennedy, the idea that such a beloved and high-profile figure could be killed so suddenly was a shock. This was especially true of Princess Diana: Royalty die of old age, political intrigue or eating too much rich food; they don't get killed by a common drunk driver.

Unlike many conspiracy theories, though, this one had a billionaire promoting it: Mohamed Al-Fayed, the father of Dodi Al-Fayed, who was killed along with Diana. Al-Fayed claims that the accident was in fact an assassination by British intelligence agencies, at the request of the Royal Family. Al-Fayed's claims were examined and dismissed as baseless by a 2006 inquiry; the following year, at Diana's inquest, the coroner stated that "The conspiracy theory advanced by Mohamed Al Fayed has been minutely examined and shown to be without any substance." On April 7, 2008, the coroner's jury concluded that Diana and Al-Fayed were unlawfully killed due to negligence by their drunken chauffeur and pursuing paparazzi, The New York Times reported.

The conspiracy theory was also believed by Prince Harry, who said in January, 2023, that he believed she could still be alive for "many years" after the crash. He told Anderson Cooper on "60 Minutes" that he thought she may have faked her own death and they would be reunited at some point.

Subliminal advertising

Ever been watching a movie and suddenly get the munchies? Or sitting on your sofa watching TV and suddenly get the irresistible urge to buy a new car? If so, you may be the victim of a subliminal advertising conspiracy! Proponents of this conspiracy theory include Wilson Bryan Key (author of "Subliminal Seduction") and Vance Packard (author of "The Hidden Persuaders"), both of whom claimed that subliminal (subconscious) messages in advertising were rampant and damaging. Though the books caused a public outcry and led to FCC hearings, much of both books have since been discredited, and several key "studies" of the effects of subliminal advertising were revealed to have been faked.

In the 1980s, concern over subliminal messages spread to bands such as Styx and Judas Priest, with the latter band even being sued in 1990 for allegedly causing a teen's suicide with subliminal messages (the case was dismissed). Subliminal mental processing does exist, and can be tested. But just because a person perceives something (a message or advertisement, for example) subconsciously means very little by itself. There is no inherent benefit of subliminal advertising over regular advertising, any more than there would be in seeing a flash of a commercial instead of the full twenty seconds. Getting a person to see something for a split-second is easy; filmmakers do it all the time (watch the last few frames in Hitchcock's classic "Psycho"). Getting a person to buy or do something based on that split-second is another matter entirely.

Moon landing hoax

NASA landed astronauts on the moon in 1969. By the 1970s, a bizarre conspiracy emerged — that the moon landing never happened.

The conspiracy was described in a 1976 self-published book, "We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle," and a 1978 movie, "Capricorn One." Even as late as 2001, there was a Fox documentary, "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?" that gave air time to the claims that the whole Apollo moon-landing program was faked.

There are plenty of debunkings of the various moon hoax claims, and then there's the issue of the hundreds of pounds of moon rocks that have been studied around the world and verified as being of extraterrestrial origin. How did NASA get the rocks if not during a moon landing? Why would scientists from around the globe willingly participate in the American space agency's hoax?

Many astronauts have been offended by the implication that they faked their accomplishments. In 2002, when conspiracy theorist Bart Sibrel confronted Buzz Aldrin and called him a "coward and a liar" for faking the moon landings, the then 72-year-old punched Sibrel in the jaw.

Paul McCartney's death

Paul McCartney is not dead. As of mid-2024, he was still touring. He gives interviews, he has a website, he occasionally appears in the tabloids.

Pretty good for a guy that some conspiracy theorists think died in 1966.

The "Paul is dead" conspiracy goes something like this: On Nov. 9, 1966, Paul McCartney got into an argument with the other Beatles, stormed out of the studio and was promptly decapitated in a car accident. To cover the whole thing up, the band hired a look-alike (and sound-alike).

After going through all this trouble, though, the band then took great pains to drop clues in their album covers and lyrics to hint to the public that something was amiss. For example, on the cover of the Abbey Road album, all four Beatles are photographed striding across a zebra crossing, but only McCartney is barefoot and out of step with the other three. This must mean something, right? Despite public denials by the band (and many, many public appearances by McCartney), fans couldn't just let it be, and came together to look for more clues.

John F. Kennedy's assassination

John F. Kennedy was shot in 1963 in a Dallas motorcade. But did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone? Or was there a second gunman on the grassy knoll?

These questions are the gateway to a vast arena of conspiracy theories that have spawned endless speculation and hundreds of books, articles and films. It didn't help that Lee Harvey Oswald was murdered in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters while surrounded by police officers only two days after the assassination — and by a guy with ties to the Mob. The whole thing stunk, people figured.

Plenty of shadowy culprits have been suggested as the masterminds of the Kennedy assassination: Fidel Castro's government, or maybe anti-Castro activists, or organized crime, or the CIA, or Vice President Lyndon Johnson, or … Well, the thing about presidents is, it turns out, they have a lot of enemies. The Warren Commission report, produced by the official investigation into Kennedy's death, found no evidence of overarching conspiracies, though plenty of theories still flourish.

Roswell crash & cover-up

There is one fact that almost all skeptics and believers agree on: Something crashed on a remote ranch outside of Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. The government at first claimed it was some sort of saucer, then retracted the statement and claimed it was really a weather balloon. Yet the best evidence suggests that it was neither a flying saucer nor a weather balloon, but instead a high-altitude, top-secret military balloon dubbed Project Mogul.

As it turns out, descriptions of the wreckage first reported by the original eyewitnesses very closely match photos of the Project Mogul balloons, down to the silvery finish and strange symbols on its side. The stories about crashed alien bodies did not surface until decades later and in fact no one considered the Roswell crash as anything extraterrestrial or unusual until thirty years later, when a book on the topic was published. There was indeed a cover-up, but it did not hide a crashed saucer. Instead, it hid a Cold War-era spying program.

Protocols of the Elders of Zion

"The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" is a hoaxed antisemitic book that purported to reveal a Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination. It first appeared in Russia in 1905, and described how Christians' morality, finances, and health would be targeted by a small group of powerful Jews. The antisemitic idea that there is a Jewish conspiracy is nothing new, of course, and has been repeated by many prominent people including Henry Ford and Mel Gibson. In 1920, Henry Ford paid to have half a million copies of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" published, and in the 1930s, the book was used by the Nazis as justification for its genocide against Jews (in fact, Adolf Hitler referred to the "Protocols" in his book "Mein Kampf").

Though the book has been completely discredited as a hoax and forgery, it is still in print and remains widely circulated around the world.

The Satanic panic

For years during the 1980s and 1990s, America became convinced that an underground network of Satanists was working together to kidnap, torture and abuse children. None of it was real, but the conspiracy theories destroyed lives and livelihoods.

The pinnacle was Geraldo Rivera's infamous NBC special "Devil Worship: Exposing Satan's Underground," which aired on Oct. 28, 1988. Rivera relied on self-proclaimed "Satanism experts," misleading and inaccurate statistics, crimes with only tenuous links to Satanism, and sensationalized media reports. It was the most-viewed documentary in television history. "There are over one million Satanists in this country," Rivera said, adding that "The odds are, [they] are in your town."

The panic grew out of the idea that memories of abuse were often repressed and could be recovered with the help of hypnosis and a therapist. This idea was popularized in the 1980 book "Michelle Remembers," co-written by a Canadian psychiatrist and the patient he eventually married (ethics red flag), in which the eponymous Michelle recovers memories of supposed ritual Satanic abuse conducted by her mother.

In 1983, the panic exploded with the McMartin preschool trial, in which a California parent accused daycare owners of sexually abusing her son. Police then sent a letter to parents warning that their children may have been abused, urging the parents to ask what turned out to be leading questions to a bunch of suggestible preschoolers. Further questioning by authorities continued in this vein, yielding alleged eyewitness accounts by children of networks of secret tunnels and witches flying through the air.

After seven years, the daycare owners were eventually acquitted or had the charges dismissed. One was jailed for five years while awaiting trials and retrials. In the meantime, similar accusations spread through daycares around the country. Most were spurred on by now-discredited methods of questioning small children, methods that often led to children making sensational accusations because they wanted to please the authority figures questioning them.

In a 1992 report on ritual crime, FBI agent Kenneth Lanning concluded that the rampant rumors around ritual Satanism were unfounded. Phillips Stevens, Jr., associate professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Buffalo, said that the widespread allegations of crimes by Satanists "constitute the greatest hoax perpetrated upon the American people in the twentieth century."

Chemtrails

As airplanes travel, they leave behind them long water condensation trails called contrails. These cloud-like tracks dissipate quickly.

But to some conspiracy theorists, these condensation trails are much more nefarious. The "Chemtrails" conspiracy theory holds that condensation trails are full of other chemicals that scientists and governments are seeding into the atmosphere. Why? Pick your reason. It might be biological warfare or population control or geoengineering or an attempt to manipulate the weather.

Researchers who study things like clouds' impact on global temperatures are often harassed by Chemtrails believers, who think they're part of a large-scale conspiracy to secretly spray unknown chemicals into the atmosphere, according to Harvard University's David Keith. A 2016 study even debunked chemtrails scientifically, finding no evidence of unusual contrails or unexplained contamination in the environment. But true believers aren't swayed, as The Guardian reported in 2017.

Barack Obama birtherism

Some conspiracies, like chemtrails, percolate in the background of certain communities, never really penetrating the larger public. Others have big impacts. The Barack Obama birtherism conspiracy is one of the latter.

Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States, was born in 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii. But as soon as Obama began his campaign for president in 2008, "birthers" began to circulate the conspiracy theory that Obama had actually been born in Kenya, the country of his father. They argued that this meant Obama was not "a natural-born citizen of the U.S." — even though his mother was an American citizen — and thus he could not be president.

Nevermind that there were announcements of Obama's birth in the Honolulu newspaper, or that friends of Obama's mother remembered the day she went into labor. To combat the conspiracies, Obama not only had to release a copy of his birth certificate in 2008, he had to follow up with a release of the original "long form" document in 2011, contrary to the hospital's usual policy of issuing computer copies of birth certificates as acceptable identification.

The 2011 release reduced the number of Americans who believed in birtherism, according to Gallup polling. But many conservative political activists and pundits raised their profiles by advocating for birtherism. Among them? Donald Trump, who was at the time the soon-to-be-president.

COVID and 5G

Probably no event since 9/11 has spawned more conspiratorial thinking than the COVID-19 pandemic. There are conspiracies about the origin of the virus as well as basically every government's reactions. Many people even believe doctors are lying about COVID-related deaths, blaming the virus for deaths with other causes. A distrust of "Big Pharma," fomented for years by "alternative medicine" advocates like Kevin Trudeau (bestselling author of "Natural Cures They Don't Want You To Know About" — a textbook conspiratorial title if there ever was one), have also fed into conspiracies about medical treatment and vaccination.

One of the odder conspiracies mixes long-standing fears of 5G wireless technology with fears about the virus. According to the COVID 5G conspiracy, electromagnetic frequencies from cell phone towers undermine the immune system, making people sick with COVID, researchers reported in 2020 in the journal Media International Australia. Another conspiracy theory claims that the COVID-19 vaccines contain tracking chips that connect to 5G networks so that the government, or possibly billionaire and vaccine philanthropist Bill Gates, can surveille everyone's movements.

As CNBC points out, 5G chips are too large to fit through a vaccine syringe, and even the smallest RFID chips that could fit require a power source that couldn't make the squeeze.

Birds aren't real

When is a conspiracy not a conspiracy? When it's an elaborate piece of performance art.

Or… does that make it even more of a conspiracy theory?

The Birds Aren't Real conspiracy is a movement developed by Peter McIndoe, 23, who started spreading the idea in 2017. Until a December 2021 interview in the New York Times, McIndoe stayed in-character as a true believer, insisting in media interviews and online that birds aren't real, but rather they are surveillance drones made by the U.S. government. Birds Aren't Real has a staff; it has organized real-life protests; it bought real-life billboards; and it emblazoned vans with their claim. The goal, says McIndoe, is to parody the misinformation that Gen Z finds itself stewing in.

"Birds Aren't Real is not a shallow satire of conspiracies from the outside. It is from the deep inside," he told The New York Times. "A lot of people in our generation feel the lunacy in all this, and Birds Aren't Real has been a way for people to process that."

The experiment revealed that conspiracies sometimes grow by credulity: Local media sometimes reported on Birds Aren't Real as if it was something young people really believed rather than an elaborate joke. Birds Aren't Real organizers hope the joke will become a force for good by exposing all the ways misinformation thrives.

"Yes, we have been intentionally spreading misinformation for the past four years, but it's with a purpose," McIndoe said. "It's about holding up a mirror to America in the internet age."

The Earth is flat

Flat-Earth conspiracy theories first arose in the 1950s and have been given new life in the Internet age. They’re bizarre, almost quaint. After all, even ancient people knew the Earth was round. The Greeks even figured out the planet’s circumference in the 3rd century. Since then, astronauts have launched into space and seen the “Blue Marble” with their own eyes.

But Flat Earth believers don’t see beyond their own horizon: The line between Earth and sky looks pretty flat, they figure, and all the rest of the evidence gets tossed out the window. On YouTube and message boards, Flat-Earthers spend their time inventing weird physics to try to explain how things like gravity and lunar eclipses could possibly work if Earth were a flat disk. Many are motivated by religious belief or the desire to see the universe as a more caring, human-centered place, Michael Wood, a lecturer in psychology at the University in Winchester in England, told Live Science in 2018.

COVID treatments cause COVID deaths

The “COVID vaccines contain 5G chips” conspiracy theory is easy to mock, but a less-absurd-sounding conspiracy around COVID is very likely costing lives: Some people believe that the very drugs that can be used to treat COVID-19 are actually killing patients.

This has led to stories about people infected with the disease who have refused effective drugs, like the antiviral remdesivir, because they’ve put their trust in online “alternative health” sources who are often selling their own unproven (or in many cases, disproven) treatments. One of these viral alt-health podcasters, a former chiropractor named Bryan Ardis, has also been spreading the bizarre notion that COVID-19 isn’t even caused by a virus, but by snake venom injected into “certain people” by the Catholic Church and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. No word on how the millions of people infected with COVID-19 at this point have failed to notice the Pope skulking around their bedroom with a syringe full of snake venom, but never mind. Ardis, of course, sells his own line of supplements meant to combat this imaginary venom.

Reptilians run the U.S. government

The idea that the U.S. government (or perhaps the entire world government) is run by reptilian humanoids is … out there, to say the least. And yet, people holding this belief have done real damage. For example, a man who detonated a bomb in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, on Christmas Day 2020 had written a friend about his belief that lizard people walked the planet, disguised as humans. Warner killed himself, damaged 41 buildings, and injured three in the bombing.

The idea of half-lizard, half-human beings goes way back, with one academic tracing it to a pulp fiction magazine story from 1929. British conspiracy theorist David Icke has been a key spreader of the “reptilian shapeshifters control the world” conspiracy, which sometimes overlaps with New World Order conspiracy theories that suggest that an elite cabal plan to institute authoritarian global government. These conspiracies often overlap with anti-Semitism, assigning this supposed cabal Jewish roots.

The reptilian conspiracy theory got a small signal-boost with the death of Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022. According to Politifact, Facebook flagged and removed multiple posts after the queen’s death calling the monarch a reptile and linking to strange videos claiming the entire royal family is reptilian.

Health authorities are hiding natural cures

Conspiratorial thinking about health is widespread. A 2014 research letter published in JAMA Internal Medicine found that 37% of Americans believe that the Food and Drug Administration is suppressing natural cures for cancer because of drug company pressure. This was the most-believed health conspiracy in the study. Twenty percent also said they believed public health officials to be hiding data showing that cell phones cause cancer, and 20% said that doctors vaccinate children with risky immunizations, knowing them to be dangerous.

The National Cancer Institute reports that there has been no link found between cell phone use and cancer, and the 1998 study that first linked vaccines with autism was retracted by the journal for research misconduct. And as for natural cures for cancer? Respected oncologists actually do support treatment such as massage and music therapy for cancer patients — but alongside pharmaceuticals that are tested in clinical trials and have a proven track record.

Many "natural health" promoters get rich selling their own (unregulated) supplements and vitamins, making their financial conflict of interest just as pressing as any pharmaceutical company's. Kevin Trudeau, author of the book "Natural Cures 'They' Don't Want You to Know About" and "Diet Cures 'They Don't Want You to Know About," was convicted of fraud in 2013 for making false claims in his infomercials and books. Despite spending eight years in prison, he's still giving talks and raising money from his fan club — money the federal government is currently trying to trace, as Trudeau owes nearly $37 million as a settlement for the people who bought his falsehood-filled diet book.

Fan theories gone wild

Not all conspiracy theories are political — or even that consequential. The world of internet fandoms can be wild, with true believers on social media spinning dramatic tales about their favorite celebrities' real lives.

The weirdest of these theories play on the fact that fans know the celebrities they see on their screens are packaged through production companies and filtered through public relations strategies. This sheen of unreality may make it easier to believe, for example, that Canadian singer Avril Lavinge is dead and has been since around 2003, when her record company replaced her with a body double.

"It's so dumb," Lavinge (who is very much alive) told EW in 2019.

An even bigger brouhaha arose around Chinese actor Zhang Zhehan, who was canceled and denounced in 2021 after pictures emerged of him online visiting a controversial Japanese World War II memorial. Zhang's career evaporated overnight, and when he returned to social media after months away, some fans became convinced that this new poster was a deepfake, according to Vox. They even analyzed the facial wrinkles of his pet dog and doxxed the actor's therapist. (Zhang now has a verified Instagram account and is experiencing a career revival outside of China.)

Celebrities have reported these conspiracies affect their real lives. A group of One Direction fans called "Larries" spent years insisting that now-former bandmates Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson were a secret couple, which affected the pair's real friendship, Tomlinson told Seventeen magazine in 2017. "It created this atmosphere between the two of us where everyone was looking into everything we did," Tomlinson said. "It took away the vibe you get off anyone."

"They" want you to eat bugs

To combat climate change, experts recommend eating less meat and more plants. In some circles, this advice for a warming planet has transformed into something more sinister: The "ruling class" wants everyone (else) to eat bugs.

It's a claim made by conservative media personalities like Michael Knowles and Tucker Carlson, and often used to mock anyone who suggests the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. According to NPR, the conspiracy theory percolated through the message board 4chan starting in 2019. Some social media posters talk about the theory with a sardonic flare — the phrase "I will not eat the bugs," is a common refrain — while others have attempted to tie it in with wider anti-Semitic beliefs about a global cabal trying to control the masses.

The darkest version of these conspiratorial beliefs is called "The Great Reset," which holds that the global elite plan to enslave the masses in a kind of survivalist dystopia, where freedom is a thing of the past and the only thing to eat is insects.

Denver International Airport is a hub for the Illuminati

The Denver International Airport is a quirky place, known for its offbeat art: Gargoyles overlook the baggage claims, murals depict scenes of war and horror, and there's a 32-foot (9.75 meter) blue horse with red eyes presiding over the road leading in and out of the terminal.

All of this weirdness, combined with the municipal drama surrounding the airport's construction (the project went almost $3 billion over budget), sparked an array of conspiracy theories. The most common, according to the Denver Public Library, is that the airport is secretly the headquarters of the New World Order, the Illuminati, the Reptilians or some other shadowy groups with plans to take over the world.

To bolster these beliefs, theorists spin alternative explanations of the airport's odd decor. For example, an inlay in the floor with the symbols for "gold" (Au) and "silver," (Ag) referencing Colorado's mining history, become a secret message about a made-up pathogen known as the Australian Antigen. A mural decrying war and wishing for world peace becomes a warning about a totalitarian future.

All of this is built, according to the theorists, on top of a six-story deep bunker where the elites will hunker down to ride out the end of the world. Or maybe it's a prison for dissenters. Of course, there's no evidence of anything beneath the airport besides maintenance tunnels, a baggage transport system, and harried travelers moving between terminals on an underground train. But that doesn't stop those who want to believe in something more nefarious beneath this airline hub.

Conspiracy theories may be popular, but they are far from harmless.

"Conspiracy theories historically have been linked with prejudice, genocide, risky health behaviour, climate denial, and more recently some quite disturbing behaviour related to QAnon and COVID-19 conspiracy theories. They can turn people away from mainstream politics and science," Douglas said.

Conspiracy theory quiz

Of all the conspiracy theories that litter the Internet, the flat Earth conspiracy is quite possibly the most curious. After all, the ancient Greeks figured out the planet's shape (and even its circumference) in the third century B.C. 

But a fringe society founded in the 1950s, dedicated to insisting that the Earth is flat, has given rise to a modern ground of flat Earth adherents. These believers claim that the Earth is a flat disc, and that evidence that it is round — say, pictures taken from space — are an elaborate hoax involving multiple governments. Opinions differ on exactly how the flat Earth works, with believers concocting elaborate versions of physics and creative interpretations of the solar system to make their theories work. 

No one knows how many flat Earth believers are out there. According to Smithsonian Magazine, membership in the Flat Earth Society, founded in 1956, once reached 3,500 people. Today, the society claims more than 500 members on its roster. But some believers want nothing to do with the Flat Earth Society, according to a 2019 CNN article, with some attendees of the Flat Earth International Conference in Dallas that year telling the news agency that the organization is a government-sponsored front designed to make Flat Earthers look bad. (The Flat Earth Society responded to this by telling CNN, "We are not a government-controlled body. We're an organization of Flat Earth theorists that long predates most of the FEIC newcomers to the scene.")

Who are flat-earthers?

As the Flat Earth Society/Flat Earth International Conference schism reveals, flat-earthers are not a monolithic group. The current president of the Flat Earth Society, Daniel Shenton, is a Londoner who now lives in Hong Kong. Robbie Davidson, who organizes the annual Flat Earth International Conferences, is a Canadian who espouses Biblical literalism and opposes what he calls "scientism."

A 2017 national poll by Public Policy Polling found that only 1% of Americans believed the Earth was flat, with an additional 6% saying they weren't sure. There was very little evidence of differences in this belief by political affiliation, with any differences between Trump voters, Clinton voters and third-party voters falling within the poll's margin of error of 3.2%.

A 2018 article in the Colorado Sun on a flat Earth convention in Denver found that many attendees believed a whole suite of conspiracy theories, such as that all politicians are actors and that powerful shadowy forces control the world. 

Flat-earthers occasionally get a boost from celebrity believers. For instance, on Jan. 25, 2016, rapper-singer Bobby Ray Simmons Jr. (known as B.o.B) released a track called "Flatline" in which he disses astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, after the two had a Twitter battle over the spherical-ness of the planet. B.o.B is convinced Earth is flat. A day earlier, the rapper tweeted: "No matter how high in elevation you are... the horizon is always eye level ... sorry cadets... I didn't wanna believe it either." In 2018, NBA player Kyrie Irving had to apologize after causing a media controversy by speculating that the Earth was flat on a 2017 podcast. 

Flat Earth map

The leading flat-earther theory holds that Earth is a disc with the Arctic Circle in the center and Antarctica, a 150-foot-tall (45 meters) wall of ice, around the rim. NASA employees, they say, guard this ice wall to prevent people from climbing over and falling off the disc. (In keeping with their skepticism of NASA, known flat-earther conspiracy theorist Nathan Thompson approached a man he said was a NASA employee in a Starbucks in mid-May 2017. In a YouTube video of the exchange, Thompson, founder of the Official Flat Earth and Globe Discussion page, shouted that he had proof the Earth is flat — apparently saying an astronaut drowning was that proof — and that NASA is "lying.")

Furthermore, Earth's gravity is an illusion, they say. Objects do not accelerate downward; instead, the disc of Earth accelerates upward at 32 feet per second squared (9.8 meters per second squared), driven up by a mysterious force called dark energy. Currently, there is disagreement among flat-earthers about whether or not Einstein's theory of relativity permits Earth to accelerate upward indefinitely without the planet eventually surpassing the speed of light. (Einstein's laws apparently still hold in this alternate version of reality.)

As for what lies underneath the disc of Earth, this is unknown, but most flat-earthers believe it is composed of "rocks."

It's worth noting that all of the above is completely contentious even within the flat Earth community. "None of us believe that we're a flying pancake in space," Davidson told CNN in the 2019 article. At the Flat Earth International Conferences, it's more common to believe that space simply does not exist at all and the disc of the Earth sits still, he said. One speaker at the 2018 FEIC even argued that Earth is neither a sphere nor a disc, but instead is shaped like a diamond, according to The Guardian.

Do flat-earthers think the moon is flat?

Flat Earth opinions about the moon vary. Some think that while Earth is flat, the moon and sun are spheres, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported. In this vision of the solar system, Earth's day and night cycle is explained by positing that the sun and moon are spheres measuring 32 miles (51 kilometers) that move in circles 3,000 miles (4,828 km) above the plane of the Earth. (Stars, they say, move in a plane 3,100 miles up.) Like spotlights, these celestial spheres illuminate different portions of the planet over a 24-hour cycle. Flat-earthers believe there must also be an invisible "antimoon" that obscures the moon during lunar eclipses.

On YouTube, there are videos pointing to shadows in pictures of the moon and arguing that the moon is transparent, and thus just a light. One speaker at the 2018 conference attended by a Guardian reporter made a case for the moon as a projection.

What is the Zetetic Method?

If flat-earthers seem hard to dissuade based on standard scientific evidence, there's a reason for that: flat Earth theorizing follows from a mode of thought called the "Zetetic Method." The Zetetic Method is an alternative to the scientific method, developed by a 19th-century flat-earther, in which sensory observations reign supreme. 

"Broadly, the method places a lot of emphasis on reconciling empiricism and rationalism, and making logical deductions based on empirical data," Flat Earth Society vice president Michael Wilmore, an Irishman, told Live Science in 2017. 

In Zetetic astronomy, the perception that Earth is flat leads to the deduction that it must actually be flat; the antimoon, NASA conspiracy and all the rest are just rationalizations for how that might work in practice.

Those details make the flat-earthers' theory so elaborately absurd it sounds like a joke, but many of its supporters genuinely consider it a more plausible model of astronomy than the one found in textbooks. In short, they aren't kidding. 

"The question of belief and sincerity is one that comes up a lot," Wilmore said. "If I had to guess, I would probably say that at least some of our members see the Flat Earth Society and Flat Earth Theory as a kind of epistemological exercise, whether as a critique of the scientific method or as a kind of 'solipsism for beginners.' There are also probably some who thought the certificate would be kind of funny to have on their wall. That being said, I know many members personally, and I am fully convinced of their belief."

Wilmore counts himself among the true believers. "My own convictions are a result of philosophical introspection and a considerable body of data that I have personally observed, and which I am still compiling," he said.

Wilmore and the society's president Shenton both think the evidence for global warming is strong, despite much of this evidence coming from satellite data gathered by NASA, the kingpin of the "round Earth conspiracy." They also accept evolution and most other mainstream tenets of science. This is in contrast to Davidson, who disputes other scientific theories and findings, such as evolution, that contradict a strict interpretation of the Bible. 

How we know the Earth is NOT flat?

Despite the claims from flat-earthers, there are plenty of ways to know that the world is round. One quick option is to check out NASA's image library, which is chock-full of nice, curvy pictures of the globe taken from the International Space Station. If NASA is hoaxing everyone, they're committed to the bit. 

Don't trust NASA? The Russians also snap pictures of the round Earth, Space.com reported. So does Japan's space agency. And China's.

For the flat-earther convinced that all these countries put aside their political tensions in order to maintain the fiction that Earth is spherical, there are also ways to check on the planet's shape with one's own eyes. One of the simplest is to go to a harbor and watch the ships depart. As a ship disappears over the horizon, the bottom of the ship will go first, followed gradually by the mast. 

Related: 8 ways life would get weird on a flat Earth

You can also take a page out of the ancient Greeks' book. Ancient Hellenistic philosophers figured out that the world had to be a globe based on a few observations. One was that the stars aren't the same in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres: From opposite halves of the Earth, you're clearly looking out at different quadrants of space. Another was that Earth's shadow on the moon's surface during lunar eclipses is curved. 

The Greeks even figured out how to calculate an approximate circumference of the Earth with no fancier tools than a stick and the light of the sun. By measuring the angle of a shadow cast by the sun at the same time and day in two cities a known distance apart, the philosopher Eratosthenes was able to calculate that the planet's circumference was between 24,000 and about 29,000 miles (38,600 and 46,670 kilometers). (It's actually 24,900 miles.) The very fact that the angle of the sun differs on different parts of the planet indicates that we're all sitting on a globe. 

Conspiracy theory psychology

As inconceivable as their belief system seems, it doesn't really surprise experts. Karen Douglas, a psychologist at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom who studies the psychology of conspiracy theories, says flat-earthers' beliefs cohere with those of other conspiracy theorists she has studied.

"It seems to me that these people do generally believe that the Earth is flat. I'm not seeing anything that sounds as if they're just putting that idea out there for any other reason," Douglas told Live Science.

She said all conspiracy theories share a basic thrust: They present an alternative theory about an important issue or event, and construct an (often) vague explanation for why someone is covering up that "true" version of events. "One of the major points of appeal is that they explain a big event but often without going into details," she said. "A lot of the power lies in the fact that they are vague."

The self-assured way in which conspiracy theorists stick to their story imbues that story with special appeal. After all, flat-earthers are more adamant that the Earth is flat than most people are that the Earth is round (probably because the rest of us feel we have nothing to prove). "If you're faced with a minority viewpoint that is put forth in an intelligent, seemingly well-informed way, and when the proponents don't deviate from these strong opinions they have, they can be very influential. We call that minority influence," Douglas said.

In a study published online March 5, 2014, in the American Journal of Political Science, Eric Oliver and Tom Wood, political scientists at the University of Chicago, found that about half of Americans endorse at least one conspiracy theory, from the notion that 9/11 was an inside job to the JFK conspiracy. "Many people are willing to believe many ideas that are directly in contradiction to a dominant cultural narrative," Oliver told Live Science. He says conspiratorial belief stems from a human tendency to perceive unseen forces at work, known as magical thinking. 

However, flat-earthers don't fit entirely snugly in this general picture. Most conspiracy theorists adopt many fringe theories, even ones that contradict each other. Meanwhile, flat-earthers' only hang-up is the shape of the Earth. "If they were like other conspiracy theorists, they should be exhibiting a tendency toward a lot of magical thinking, such as believing in UFOs, ESP, ghosts the Devil, or other unseen, intentional forces," Oliver wrote in an email. "It doesn't sound like they do, which makes them very anomalous relative to most Americans who believe in conspiracy theories."

Editor's Note: This article was first published on Oct. 26, 2012, and updated by Stephanie Pappas on Dec. 16, 2021 and Oct. 17, 2022.

Conspiracy theories lurk all over the internet and cover a dizzying range of topics — from the idea that the moon landings were faked to the belief that Earth is flat. Often, believers will readily dismiss any and all evidence that contradicts such claims, and suggest that witnesses or experts who dispute the ideas are simply part of the conspiracy.

As a general rule, people don't like being unable to make sense of things; we are curious, and we want to understand the world around us. In the past, science couldn't explain many of the phenomena humans encountered, and so the easiest and most efficient response to an unanswerable question was to credit an omnipotent, omniscient higher power. Science is now able to answer many of the questions that once stumped us, and while we don't always have the answers, now, more than at any point in our history, we have the capacity to accurately explain and understand all manner of phenomena.

With that in mind, why do people believe in conspiracy theories, even when there is a mountain of evidence to show that they are incorrect? Why are conspiracy theories so prevalent today — and what exactly is a conspiracy theory?

Related: 20 of the best conspiracy theories

"A conspiracy theory is a belief that two or more actors have coordinated in secret to achieve an outcome, and that [exposing] this conspiracy is of public interest," Karen Douglas, a professor of social psychology at the University of Kent in the U.K., told Live Science in an email.

This interpretation is supported by Hugo Drochon, a professor of political theory at the University of Nottingham in the U.K..

"At its core, a conspiracy theory is a belief that there is a small group of shadowy people who control everything in the world. This is why we get conspiracy theories about climate change being a 'hoax': it's because [conspiracy theorists believe] this nefarious group wants to control us," Drochon told Live Science.

So, how do such theories grow and prosper? What makes someone — or a group of people — adamant that they are being lied to, and that they are being deliberately misled by a cabal of concealed truth-twisters? 

Conspiracy theories "begin with us trying to understand complex events," Daniel Jolley, a University of Nottingham professor of social psychology, told Live Science in an email. "Conspiracy theories arguably offer simple solutions to complex problems."

Douglas suggested that such notions often flourish when people need answers in times of stress.

"Conspiracy theories tend to emerge when important things happen that people want to make sense of," she said. "In particular, they tend to emerge in times of crisis when people feel worried and threatened. They grow and thrive under conditions of uncertainty." 

Douglas added that "it is difficult to argue all conspiracy theories are malicious," and said that more often than not conspiracy theories stem from people wanting to try to make sense of difficult situations. 

"Unique ingredients" make conspiracy theories spread

In terms of what makes a particular theory spread, Jolley explained that a number of elements need to be in place.

"To achieve popularity and longevity, a conspiracy theory requires some unique ingredients coming together. The event or overarching issue needs to be significant, the conspirators need to be realistic (i.e., a tightly formed group), and the ground needs to be fertile."

Simply put: a conspiracy theory needs to appeal directly to people who will be willing to believe it, exactly at a time when they're most likely to believe it, and there needs to be a group or organization to blame.

"Take COVID-19 as an example," Jolley continued. "It is a significant event that people are trying to understand. The ground was fertile because COVID bred feelings of uncertainty and anxiety. These aspects meant conspiracy theories grew and thrived."

Jolley noted that conspiracy theories about 5G's purportedly detrimental impact on human health have existed for a while, but in 2020, the theory went from "a fringe to a mainstream belief when the narrative was applied to COVID-19." According to Jolley, this is a perfect example of a conspiracy theory existing for some time, but only being able to flourish when people are feeling vulnerable and are open to believing something they might otherwise dismiss.

In April 2020, an article in The New York Times reported that "baseless" theories about 5G and COVID resulted in "more than 100 incidents" in a month in the U.K. alone, which included a wireless tower in Birmingham being set ablaze.

Of course, nobody can be expected to take everything they read or hear at face value, so what distinguishes a conspiracy theorist from someone who is merely skeptical?

"We can all be a bit paranoid at times, especially if we're down or feeling a bit vulnerable. It's part of human nature," Drochon said. "But the difference for conspiracy theorists is that no amount of new information will challenge the core belief. Have you ever tried convincing a conspiracy theorist that 9/11 was not an inside job?"

Confirmation bias and echo chambers

But why do people fall for — and ultimately cling to — certain conspiracy theories? What is the allure of believing in something that is outlandish or implausible, even in the face of contradictory evidence?

"We desire to feel in control, feel certain, and feel close to those similar to us, and a conspiracy theory can enable this," Jolley said.

Research suggests that a majority of people (65%) regard themselves as having "above average" intelligence, something researchers attribute to people's "tendency to overrate one's cognitive abilities." This lack of self-awareness, as well as confirmation bias and exposure to echo chambers, could also play a role, Jolley suggested.

"Once a belief forms, people are keen to defend it," Jolley said. "They are likely to digest content that supports that belief and seek to discredit information that is not supportive. Coupled with a worldview centered on distrust towards others, you can see how someone can find themselves down the rabbit hole."

Are there certain groups of people who are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories? Or are we all at risk of becoming staunch supporters of outrageous hypotheses? 

"You'll find conspiracy theorists across all walks of life, but there are some who are more susceptible," Drochon said. "It's about exclusion, or a feeling of exclusion; maybe not having a job or being single, for example," he added.

"Sometimes we say religious people are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories because they adopt a Manichean view of the world — good versus evil — but it's more complicated than that," Drochon said. "It's often about being in a minority position, so if you are highly religious in a secularized world you're more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, but if you're highly atheist in a religious world, you will also be susceptible." 

According to Douglas, we all have the potential to fall foul of conspiracy theories if the conditions are right.

"Research suggests people are attracted to conspiracy theories when one or more psychological needs are frustrated," Douglas said. "The first of these needs are epistemic — related to the need to know the truth and have clarity and certainty. The other needs are existential, which are related to the need to feel safe and to have some control over things that are happening, and social, related to the need to maintain our self-esteem and feel positive about the groups that we belong to." 

Because of this, no one is entirely immune from the lure of a conspiracy theory, Douglas said.

"Anyone can fall prey to conspiracy theories if they have psychological needs that are not being met at any particular time." 

Originally published on Live Science.

The unicorn is one of the most famous mythical creatures, often depicted as a white horse with a spiraling horn erupting from its forehead. It's not hard to imagine a horse with a horn, and for much of the mythical creature's history, people thought it actually existed. But where did this myth come from?

Unicorn-like imagery dates back to the Indus Valley Civilization (about 3300 B.C. to 1300 B.C.) in South Asia, which included parts of modern-day Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. A side profile of what looks like a horse with a single horn appears on seals from that period. However, these images were likely depictions of aurochs (Bos primigenius), a now-extinct wild ox, according to the St Neots Museum in England. 

Written Chinese descriptions of an Asian unicorn date as far back as around 2700 B.C., according to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. This "unicorn" seemed to be a combination of different animals and had the body of a deer, the tail of an ox, a multicolored or scaly dragon-like coat and a flesh-covered horn (or horns). Despite physical differences, Asian unicorns were described as evasive and solitary creatures, just as they were in later European records. 

The first recorded mention of unicorns in Western literature came in the fourth century B.C. Ctesias, a doctor and historian, wrote down tales from Indian travelers and described horse-size "wild asses" with white bodies, blue eyes, red heads and a multicolored horn about 1.5 feet (0.5 meter) long, Time reported in 2008. Ctesias' unicorn was likely based on descriptions of multiple animals such as wild asses and Indian rhinos (Rhinoceros unicornis).

Related: Cave thought to hold unicorn bones actually home to Neanderthal artwork

Mistranslations helped transform unicorns from confusing composite animals into majestic white creatures. In the third century B.C., scholars translating the Bible from Hebrew into Greek took the Hebrew word "re'em," likely the name for aurochs, and turned it into the Greek word "monokeros," which meant "one horn," which had been used for rhinos. The word later became "unicornus" in Latin translations of the Greek Bible and "unicorn" in English versions of the Latin, according to Merriam-Webster. The unicorn thus became a Biblical animal associated with Jesus Christ and purity.      

Italian explorer Marco Polo found unicorn stories didn't quite match up to reality when he traveled through Asia and saw what he thought was a unicorn for the first time, in the 13th century — an account detailed in "The Travels of Marco Polo" (Penguin Classics, 1958). "They delight in living in mire and in mud," he wrote. "It is a hideous beast to look at, and in no way like what we think and say in our countries." 

Polo described the creature as having a large, black horn; hair like a buffalo's; and feet like an elephant's. Today, it is widely accepted that the "unicorn" Polo saw was a rhinoceros, according to Brown University Library.

In the Middle Ages, sailors and merchants introduced narwhal (Monodon monoceros) tusks to European markets and sold them as "unicorn" horns, according to the AMNH. Narwhals are toothed whales from the Arctic. Male narwhals possess a projecting tooth 6.6 to 9.8 feet (2 to 3 m) long that resembles a horn, according to the University of Washington's Polar Science Center.

Europeans didn't have a consistent description of what unicorn horns should look like before narwhal tusks were traded. After the tusks arrived in medieval markets, unicorn horns were almost always described as being long, white and spiraled, just like narwhal tusks, according to the AMNH.  

A 2004 study published in the European Journal of Archaeology noted that narwhals were largely unknown in Europe in the Middle Ages, although some people hunted them and acquired their tusks. "The unicorn is well known in medieval pictorial and written culture, particularly in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, whilst the absence of narwhals from western European art and thought is striking," the study's author wrote. While narwhals actually existed, most people hadn't heard of them, so the tusks helped reinforce tales of mythical unicorns, which weren't real but were commonly believed in.

The common belief among Europeans that unicorns actually existed waned by the 18th century, according to the St Neots Museum. After all, no one was able to find a real animal that matched the unicorn description.

Originally published on Live Science.

Researchers in Japan are investigating the origins of a nightmarish, 300-year-old mummified "mermaid," which has been worshipped for centuries due to its supposed medicinal properties. The haunting remains are most likely a gruesome amalgam of a monkey's torso sewed onto a fish's tail, potentially embellished with hair and nails from a human. 

Hiroshi Kinoshita, board member of the Okayama Folklore Society, discovered the mermaid mummy, which is around 12 inches (30.5 centimeters) long, inside a box at a temple in Okayama Prefecture. He first became aware of the mummy after he found a picture of the bizarre specimen in an encyclopedia of mythical creatures. A fisherman supposedly caught the specimen sometime between 1736 and 1741, and he subsequently sold it to an affluent family, according to a note left inside the mummy's box. Researchers still don't know exactly how the mermaid ended up inside the temple, according to Japanese news site The Asahi Shimbun.

Now, Takafumi Kato, a paleontologist at the Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts, and colleagues have begun looking into the mummy's origins after Kinoshita convinced the temple to let the scientists investigate the unusual remains. On Feb. 2, the scientists imaged the mummy using a CT scan, as seen in this video. Researchers will also take DNA samples to identify which species have been combined to make the mermaid. The team will release their results later in the year, they said. 

Related: Real or not? The science behind 12 unusual sightings 

The mermaid mummy somewhat resembles two mythical creatures from Japanese folklore: Amabies — mermaids with beaks instead of mouths and three distinct tail-fins — and Ningyos, which are fish-like creatures with human heads. Both of these types of creatures have been associated with stories of miraculous health cures and increased longevity. In one famous tale, Yao Bikuni, a woman, is said to have lived for 800 years after accidentally eating an entire Ningyo, according to U.K. news site Metro. 

The temple's priests look to the mummy as an omen of good health. "We have worshipped it, hoping that it would help alleviate the coronavirus pandemic even if only slightly," Kozen Kuida, the head priest at the temple, told The Asahi Shimbun. 

The mummy was previously put on display in a glass case at the temple for visitors to pray to, but it has spent the last 40 years in a fireproof safe within the temple to prevent it from deteriorating. Similar mermaid mummies have been worshipped at two other temples in Japan, according to The Asahi Shimbun.

These fake mermaids were likely created by local people to sell to curious Western tourists, Live Science previously reported. A similar hoax, known as the Feejee Mermaid, was sold to Dutch travelers in Japan in the 1810s and later resold to English merchants, before being shipped to the U.S., where it became part of the famous collection of P.T. Barnum (the real-life inspiration for the movie "The Greatest Showman"). This 3-foot-long (91 cm) mermaid is believed to have been made from the body of an orangutan and the tail of a salmon. 

The priests at the temple in Okayama Prefecture say they hope that the new study will add to the mummified mermaid's legacy and help it live on through future folklore. "I hope the research project can leave scientific records for future generations," Kuida told The Asahi Shimbun.

Originally published on Live Science.

You don’t need to believe in ghosts to enjoy a ghost story about some of the most haunted places. The tales that have grown over generations around reputedly haunted houses can take on a fantastic life of their own in folklore, and the stories that surround a place can influence our experiences of them. All it takes is a creepy place, a touch of imagination and a glimpse of something unexpected, only half seen. So prepare to suspend your disbelief for this countdown of the histories of 11 of the most haunted places in the United States.

Waverly Hills Sanatorium

This grim, bat-winged building is the archetype of the haunted hospital or insane asylum. The first hospital on this windswept hill on the edge of Louisville, Kentucky, was built in 1910 to treat victims of the "white plague" of tuberculosis that was ravaging the country.

At the time, there was no known cure and the disease was often fatal. In some cases, doctors tried experimental methods to help ease the symptoms, and stories emerged of illicit medical experiments in which the cure often proved as fatal as the disease. Certainly the sanatorium was the scene of many deaths over the years, although claims that more than 60,000 patients died there are exaggerated, according to surviving records from the hospital. Historians say the real number was likely closer to 8,000, with a total of 152 deaths in 1945, the worst year of the epidemic.

Waverly Hills served as a geriatric hospital from the 1960s until the 1980s, and several stories about the spooky old hospital are based on rumors from this time that patients were mistreated, including claims that radical treatments such as electroshock therapy were used.

In the years since Waverly Hills was closed for good, wanderers, thrill-seekers and ghost hunters who found their way inside the building have told of slamming doors and strange noises in the deserted building. Others reported hearing footsteps and the screams of patients have from empty rooms. Ghostly, shadowy forms have been said to gather in the building's dark recesses and are said to follow visitors through the narrow corridors. Phantom footsteps and voices reportedly echo along the "death tunnel," or "body chute" — an underground tunnel that leads from the hospital to railway tracks at the bottom of the hill, to transport the dead away from the hospital where the living patients would not see them.

Several stories center on the fifth floor of the hospital, where tuberculosis patients with mental disturbances were reportedly treated. In particular, Room 502, where two nurses are said to have killed themselves — one by hanging, the other by jumping to her death — is said to be haunted. Some visitors claimed to have seen mysterious shapes moving in the windows, or to have heard voices telling them to "get out."

New Jersey's Pine Barrens

The vast forested region now known as the New Jersey Pine Barrens thrived in the colonial period, when it was home to several saw mills, paper mills and towns for the people who worked in them. But its prosperity and population declined sharply when coal was discovered in nearby Pennsylvania and people moved there instead. The remains of several "ghost towns," as well as more than a few ghost stories, survive. The spirit of the pirate Capt. William Kidd, who frequented New Jersey's Barnegat Bay, has sometimes been seen there, and a ghostly black dog is said to roam the beaches and the forests of the coast.

One of the most famous supernatural stories of the Pine Barrens is the tale of the Jersey Devil. According to the State of New Jersey, the creature was born in 1735 as the 13th child of Deborah Leeds, the wife of a rival of Benjamin Franklin (who may have contributed to the tale); some versions of the story say she was a witch and that the father of the child was a devil himself. According to the legend, the baby was born with leathery wings, a goat's head and hooves; it reportedly flew up the chimney of the room, where it was born and has been killing livestock in the region ever since.

By the late 1700s, what was then known as the "Leeds Devil" had become a popular ghost story in the southern New Jersey area, and by the 19th century, it had grown into a local legend. It was supposedly seen by Joseph Bonaparte, the brother of Napoleon Bonaparte and the former king of Spain, who had built a mansion in the Pine Barrens, where he lived after his exile in 1813. In the 1840s, the creature was blamed for attacks on livestock that were accompanied by bloodcurdling screams, and it began to be spotted regularly in the area. The largest spate of sightings came in 1909, when newspapers published hundreds of claims by people who said they'd encountered the "Jersey Devil" in several parts of South Jersey and in Philadelphia. The widespread newspaper coverage prompted several schools in the Delaware Valley to close and workers to stay home, while vigilante groups roamed the countryside in search of the beast.

Savannah, Georgia

Home to dozens of celebrated haunted houses and hundreds of ghost sightings, Savannah is often called "the most haunted city in the United States" — especially by its many ghost tour operators, who often begin with a visit to the city's historic Bonaventure Cemetery, a tangle of stone tombs, eerie statues and spooky trees laced with Spanish moss. Among the cemetery's resident ghosts is that of Gracie Watson, a 6-year-old who died of pneumonia in 1889. Her ghost is said to haunt the life-size statue that stands over her grave, which like several other funereal statues in the cemetery are sometimes said to move as if they were alive, while the sounds of children playing or crying is sometimes heard nearby. 

Savannah's Hampton Lillybridge House was built in 1797 and was relocated to its current location several years later — despite the discovery of a mysterious crypt beneath the new property, which has never been opened. Since then, no fewer than 26 families who have lived in the house have complained of various ghostly goings-on that forced them to move out. These strange encounters included furniture moving around and doors locking themselves.

The most famous haunted house in Savannah may be the Sorrel-Weed House, which appeared in the opening shots of the 1994 film "Forrest Gump," directed by Robert Zemeckis The Sorrel-Weed house is said to be haunted by at least two vengeful ghosts: the wife and the rival lover of shipping merchant Francis Sorrel, who built the house in the 1840s. Francis' wife, Matilda Sorrel, allegedly jumped to her death when she discovered her husband’s infidelity — but historical researchers point out that by the time of her reported suicide in a "moment of lunacy," the Sorrel family had moved out to another property next door.

The White House

The most famous address in the United States — 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, D.C. — is also famously haunted. Since 1800, the White House has been the home of the president of the United States, starting with the second president, John Adams — and the ghost of his wife, Abigail Adams, has been seen there, sometimes walking through walls or carrying laundry to dry in the East Room, according to History.com. The ghost of the third president, Thomas Jefferson, has been heard playing the violin in the Yellow Oval Room. The ghost of the seventh president, Andrew Jackson, is said to have been seen lying on his old bed, while the sound of his "guttural laugh" has often been reported, including by first lady Mary Todd Lincoln. The ninth president, William Henry Harrison, is said to haunt the attic of the White House, while the 10th president, John Tyler, is said to haunt the Blue Room. 

Many of the ghostly sightings and events revolve around Abraham Lincoln; the ghost of the assassinated 16th president has been reported so many times that the phrase "Lincoln's ghost" has become well known. Some of the most famous of these events are multiple sightings in 1940 by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who was spending a night in the Lincoln Bedroom. Churchill claimed to have just climbed out of the bath, naked but smoking his habitual cigar, when he encountered Lincoln's ghost leaning on the mantelpiece above the fireplace, according to a blog entry by the National Constitution Center, a U.S. nonprofit. Churchill said, "Good evening, Mr. President; you seem to have me at a disadvantage," and then the ghost smiled and disappeared. (Churchill said he then moved to a bedroom across the hall.) 

Two years later, in 1942, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands reported seeing Lincoln's ghost, dressed in a top hat and frock coat, standing at the door of her bedroom during a visit to the White House — and fainted at the sight. Many others — including U.S. Presidents Harry S. Truman and Theodore Roosevelt, first ladies Grace Coolidge and Eleanor Roosevelt, and dozens of White House aides and staffers — have reported seeing apparitions or hearing ghostly footsteps or knocks that they have attributed to Lincoln's ghost..

Whaley House

Whaley House in San Diego is "[t]he most haunted house in America," according to Life Magazine. The home was built in 1857 on the site of a former graveyard and gallows. Over the years it has served as a family home; a grain store; the San Diego county courthouse; the city’s first commercial theater; a ballroom; a billiard hall; and a school. It subsequently opened as a museum in 1960.

The oldest resident ghost at Whaley House is said to be the convicted robber "Yankee Jim" Robinson, who was hanged in 1852 from a gallows that stood on the property before the house was built. According to a newspaper report, as the wagon holding him beneath the gallows moved away, Yankee Jim dragged his feet on the wagon for as long as possible, before swinging like a pendulum and slowly strangling to death.

Although Thomas Whaley, a settler and merchant, witnessed Yankee Jim's gruesome execution, that didn't prevent him from purchasing the property a few years later and building a house there. But within a few weeks of moving in, the Whaley family reported hearing heavy footsteps, as if made by the boots of a large man.

The reports of footsteps and other sounds have persisted for more than 100 years: The youngest daughter of the family, who lived in the house until 1953, was reportedly convinced that it was haunted by the ghost of Yankee Jim, and visitors to the museum in the 1960s also reported hearing a phantom walking noise.

Other visitors say they’ve seen the ghosts of the Whaley family themselves, and the ghost of a woman in a long skirt in the former county courtroom. One parapsychologist reported that he saw a phantom dog running inside the house, similar to a fox terrier — the type of dog owned by the Whaley family.

Bachelor's Grove Cemetery

This small cemetery in a forest on the outskirts of Chicago has earned a reputation as the most haunted graveyard in the United States, thanks to more than 100 documented sightings of ghosts, strange lights and other suggestively supernatural episodes.

During the 1950s, after an outbreak of vandalism at the remote site, several people claimed to have seen an entire phantom farmhouse shimmering above the graveyard, which receded as they approached it. Others say they have seen the ghost of a farmer and his plow horse who died when they were dragged to their death in a nearby pond.

Some people driving on the roads near the cemetery at night have reported encounters with a phantom 1940s "gangster"-style car that appears on the road in front of them, before turning off the road and disappearing. Others claimed to have crashed into the phantom car at a sharp curve in the road — but after the shock had passed, there was no damage, and no other car. 

In 1991, the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper ran a celebrated photograph taken by a visitor to the graveyard, showing what appeared to be the semi-transparent form of a woman in an old-fashioned dress sitting on a gravestone. The photographer, part of a paranormal research team, claimed that the woman was not visible when the photograph was taken. The figure in the photograph has become known as the "Madonna of Bachelor's Grove," and may be linked to the legend of the "White Lady," the ghost of a woman buried next to her young child, and who is said to walk through the graveyard on nights of the full moon, with the infant wrapped in her arms.

Colorado's Stanley Hotel

The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, is famous as the remote mountainside "Overlook Hotel" featured in the 1980 Stanley Kubrick movie "The Shining." It was also the inspiration for the Stephen King novel that was made into that movie, supposedly after he'd spent a night there during a snowstorm. 

The hotel was built in 1909 by Massachusetts inventor F.O. Stanley, who moved there with his wife, Flora. Flora Stanley was an accomplished piano player, and according to myth, her ghost sometimes can be heard playing the piano in the music room at night. F.O. Stanley is sometimes out of place in old photographs — a spooky trick that inspired the last scene of the movie. Staff at the hotel also say that ghosts have unpacked the bags of visitors and turned lights on and off and that the ghostly laughter of children can be heard in the hallways. 

The hotel's infamous Room 217, which features in both the book and the movie, is said to be haunted by the ghost of a maid who was reportedly blown out of a window there — but not killed — in a gas explosion in 1911. That's the room that King and his wife spent the night in, according to his later interviews. But while the hotel is undoubtedly creepy, the gruesome events suggested in the book and movie seem to be entirely derived from his imagination. 

It's now possible to book Room 217 at the Stanley Hotel, among other rooms. "The Shining" plays continuously on one of the in-house television channels, and the hotel conducts a thriving ghost-tour business. In addition to the ghosts of the Stanleys and the maid, a spooky cowboy is said to haunt Room 428, and hotel staff say ghosts have been seen in the tunnels under the hotel that staff once used to navigate the immense property.

New England's Covered Bridges

New England's historic covered bridges have accumulated stories of ghosts over the years. One of the best known is Emily's Bridge in Stowe, Vermont, about 30 miles east of Burlington. The spooky-looking covered bridge was the scene of a young woman's suicide by hanging in the mid-1800s, supposedly after she'd arranged to meet a lover there to elope but he didn't turn up. According to Atlas Obscura, Emily's ghost is now said to haunt the bridge, leaving claw-like gouges on passing cars and scratching the backs of people who cross the bridge on foot. Strange noises, including the sound of a woman screaming, have also been reported there. Emily's Bridge is now a fixture of Vermont's ghostly tourism industry. (However, the town of Stowe has enacted an ordinance to keep people away from the bridge at night to avoid disturbances by would-be ghost hunters.) Despite its fame, however, the story of Emily might not be true, according to the blog Obscure Vermont. 

Another haunted bridge is the Eunice Williams Covered Bridge in Greenfield, Massachusetts. It's named for Eunice Williams, who was killed in 1704 after she'd been taken captive during a raid by French and Native American forces on the English settlement at Deerfield; 47 villagers died in the assault, and the survivors were forced to march for nearly 300 miles (480 kilometers), according to a local museum in Massachusetts. Williams, the wife of a local clergyman, had reportedly given birth only a few days before; she collapsed as the captives were marching by the Green River, and was killed by a tomahawk blow. Legend has it that Williams now haunts the covered bridge that was built at the spot; her ghost has been seen near the water under the bridge and supposedly has mistaken passersby for members of her family.

New Orleans

The paranormal has a distinctive local flavor in New Orleans, which vies with Savannah for the title of the Most Haunted City in America. One of the city’s most infamous haunted houses is the LaLaurie Mansion in the French Quarter. The mansion is the former home of Madame LaLaurie, a wealthy widow and prominent socialite. In April 1834, after a fire at the house, rescuers found bound slaves in a secret torture chamber in the attic who had been horribly tortured over a long period, and there were signs that others had been murdered there. When the discovery became known, the house was raided by an outraged mob of citizens, and Madame LaLaurie fled the city. Later occupants of the building have claimed it is still haunted by the ghosts of her victims.

The St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 in New Orleans has something of a reputation for the dead not staying in their graves — among them Marie Laveau, the city's historical "Queen of Voodoo," who died in 1851 but who is said to materialize above the crypt where she is buried each St. John's Eve (June 23).

The Myrtles Plantation, at St Francisville just outside New Orleans, is rumored to have been built on a Tunica Indian burial ground. At least 12 ghosts are said to haunt the plantation grounds and buildings, including Chloe, a slave who was accused of poisoning the family of the plantation owners. The ghosts of her victims, a mother and daughter, are reported to be trapped inside a mirror in the main house.

The ghost of a later owner, William Winter, is said to haunt the main staircase of the plantation house. Winter died in 1871, after being shot by a stranger who approached the house. Winter staggered inside and climbed the stairs to the 17th step, where he died in his wife's arms. It is said his phantom footsteps can sometimes be heard on the staircase, climbing to the 17th step before stopping. 

Gettysburg

The largest and deadliest battle of the American Civil War took place at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1863. More than 8,000 combatants were killed at Gettysburg, and in the years since the bloody battle, an uncommon number of ghost stories have been linked to events and personalities on the battlefield. Several visitors to what is now the Gettysburg National Military Park have reported hearing sounds of battle, including phantom cannon fire and the disembodied shouts or screams of ghostly soldiers.

At a high, rocky outcrop on the battlefield called The Devil’s Den, where heavy fighting took place on the second day of the battle (July 2, 1836), several visitors over the years claim to have heard the sound of drum rolls and gunfire. Devil's Den is also said to be haunted by the apparently friendly and sometimes talkative ghost of a soldier wearing buckskin clothing, a large hat and no shoes. 

Several ghost sightings have also been reported at the hill called Little Round Top, where Confederate troops were forced back from an assault on the flank of the Union forces, also on July 2, 1863 — an event regarded by many historians as a turning point in the battle. It has been claimed that some Civil War enactors who worked on the 1993 film "Gettysburg," a dramatization of the battle, met and spoke with a man in a shabby Union Army uniform who gave them some musket rounds, which they assumed were movie props — but which they later learned were Civil War rounds in pristine condition.

Legend tells that three Confederate soldiers were hanged at Sach's Bridge, a covered bridge a few hundred yards west of the Gettysburg battlefield. Some stories say the soldiers had deserted from their unit, while others say they were hanged as spies. The bridge is now a favorite site for ghost hunters, and some claim to have heard sounds of loud gunfire and galloping horses, while others reported seeing strange moving mists and inexplicable lights. Sach's Bridge was on the line of retreat for Gen. Robert E. Lee's defeated Army of Northern Virginia after the Union victory at Gettysburg, and the smell of smoke from the general’s pipe has sometimes been reported nearby.

St. Augustine Lighthouse

St. Augustine's Light Station may be the best known of the hundreds of lighthouses in the United States. The first permanent lighthouse beside what is America's oldest city was built on Anastasia Island in 1824, and the current lighthouse tower was built in 1874. Tragedy struck that year when the teenage daughters of Hezekiah Pity, a man employed on the rebuilding project, were playing around a cart used to carry building materials to the site. The cart broke loose and slid down the hill, and both girls were drowned. It is said that the laughter of the two girls at play can be heard around the tower at night; and the ghost of the older girl is said to have been seen, wearing the blue dress and blue hair bow that she was wearing when she died.

The ghost of the original builder of the St. Augustine's Light Station is also said to haunt the garden beside the tower, roaming in fury after a land dispute with the city government in the early 1880s, according to the St. Augustine Light Station & Maritime Museum. Additionally, the ghosts of at least two former lighthouse keepers are said to tread the steps and gantries of the tower late at night. One of the ghosts — that of lighthouse keeper Joseph Andreu, killed in the 1850s when he died in a fall from the tower — is said to leave a trail of cigar smoke as he makes his rounds.

Local legend holds that the island is also haunted by the ghosts of 13 pirates who were buried around the tower. But while there haven’t been any pirate graves found at the site, an archaeological team based at the St. Augustine Light Station discovered a number of historic shipwrecks nearby and other maritime remains, including traces of the wooden watchtower that served as Florida's first lighthouse. 

Originally published on Live Science.

The grandfather paradox is a self-contradictory situation that arises in some time travel scenarios that is illustrated by the impossible scenario in which a person travels back in time only to kill their grandfather (who could no longer go on to produce one's parent, and hence where does that leave you and your ancestor-killing event?). The paradox is sometimes taken as an argument against the logical possibility of traveling backward in time, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Within the framework of modern physics, however, there are ways to avoid the paradox without dispensing with time travel altogether.

Related: 5 sci-fi concepts that are possible (in theory)

Grandfather paradox explained

Let's suppose you have a time machine that allows you to travel back into the past. While you're there, you accidentally kill one of your grandparents — or any other direct ancestor — before they have any offspring. That would alter a whole chain of future events, including your own birth, which would no longer happen. But if you weren't born in the future, then you couldn't kill your ancestor in the past — hence the paradox. It's a scenario that became popular in the science-fiction magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, according to the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, and the name "grandfather paradox" was firmly established by 1950.

Actually, you don't even need to kill anyone; there are many other ways you could change history that would result in your future non-existence. Perhaps the best known example is the movie "Back to the Future," in which the time-traveling protagonist inadvertently drives a wedge between his parents before they were married — and then has to work frantically to bring them together again.

Is the grandfather paradox possible?

Moving from science fiction to science fact, one person who was eminently qualified to talk about the realities of time travel was the late Stephen Hawking, arguably the most brilliant physicist of recent times. In 1999, he gave a lecture on "space and time warps," which showed how Einstein's theory of general relativity might make time travel possible, by bending space-time back on itself. 

One theoretical possibility that would allow time travel (and thus the ability to somehow kill off a critical ancestor) is a special kind of wormhole. Among the most dramatic consequences of general relativity, wormholes are often described as shortcuts between one point in space and another. But, as Hawking explained in his lecture, a wormhole could possibly loop back to an earlier point in time — a situation technically known as a "closed time-like curve" (CTC).

But if physics allows backward time travel, wouldn't the grandfather paradox still cause issues? Hawking suggested two possible ways to get around the paradox in this scenario. First, there's what he referred to as the "consistent histories" model, in which the whole of time — past, present and future — is rigidly predetermined; in that way, you can only travel back to an earlier point in time if you had already been there in your own history. In this "block universe" model, as it's sometimes called, one could travel to the past but doing so would not alter it, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Taking this view, the grandfather paradox could never arise. With Hawking's second option, on the other hand, the situation is more subtle.

Grandfather paradox and parallel worlds

This second approach to traveling back in time invokes quantum physics, where an event may have several possible outcomes with different likelihoods of occurring.

As described by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum theory sees all these various outcomes as occurring in different, "parallel" timelines. In this view, the grandfather paradox could be resolved if the time traveler starts out in a timeline where their grandfather lived long enough to have children, and then — after going back and killing their forebear — continue along a parallel time track in which they will never be born. (Stanford Encyclopedia has a more detailed look at why you can’t jump back and forth between parallel timelines at will.) As Hawking pointed out in his 1999 lecture, this seems to be the implicit assumption behind sci-fi treatments such as "Back to the Future."

At the time that movie was made in 1985, the "parallel world" explanation of the grandfather paradox was merely a philosophical conjecture. In 1991, however, it was put on firmer ground by the physicist David Deutsch, as New Scientist reported at the time. Deutsch showed that, while parallel timelines are normally incapable of interacting with each other, the situation changes in the vicinity of a closed time-like curve (CTC), when a wormhole curves back on itself. Here, just as the sci-fi writers imagined, the different timelines are able to cross over — so that when a CTC loops back into the past, it's the past of a different timeline. If that's proven, then you really could kill an infant grandparent without paradoxically eliminating yourself in the process. In that case, your grandfather would never have existed only in one parallel world. And you, the grandfather-killer, would only have existed in the other.

Grandfather paradox solved?

As surprising as it sounds, there's actually some experimental support for Deutsch's solution to the grandfather paradox. In 2014, a team at the University of Queensland examined a simpler time-travel scenario that entailed a similar logical paradox. The researchers described the work in their paper published that year in the journal Nature Communications. The idea was that a subatomic particle had to go back in time to flip the switch that resulted in its creation; if the switch wasn't flipped, the particle would never exist in the first place.

A key feature of Deutsch's theory is that the various probabilities have to be self-consistent. For instance, in the Queensland research example, if there's a 50:50 chance the particle travels back in time, then there must also be a 50:50 chance that the switch gets flipped to create that particle in the first place. In the absence of a time machine, the researchers set up an experiment involving a pair of photons, which they claimed was logically equivalent to a single photon traveling back in time to "create" itself. The experiment was a success, with the results validating Deutsch's self-consistency theory.

Grandfather paradox and the butterfly effect

Killing your grandfather when he was a child is a sure-fire way to ensure you're never born. But there are also subtler possibilities for messing up the timeline. In a sufficiently complex system, even the tiniest change can have serious long-term consequences — as in the butterfly effect, by which the flapping of a butterfly's wings can eventually trigger a tornado thousands of miles away. Sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury produced a time travel counterpart to this in his 1952 story "A Sound of Thunder," which can be read online at the Internet Archive. Bradbury's protagonist travels back to the time of the dinosaurs, where he accidentally steps on a butterfly — then returns to the present to find society changed beyond recognition. It's easy to imagine that, if the societal changes were sweeping enough, the time traveler might have prevented his own birth as surely as if he'd slain a grandparent.

But would that really be the case, using the quantum approach to the grandfather paradox? Recent work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory indicates that the course of history is more resilient than the butterfly effect might suggest. The researchers used a quantum computer to simulate time travel into the past, where a piece of information was deliberately damaged — the computational equivalent of stepping on a Jurassic-era butterfly. But unlike Bradbury's story, the knock-on effect in the "present" of the computer simulation turned out to be relatively small and insignificant. That, of course, is great news for would-be time travelers. As long as you refrain from blatantly silly acts like killing a direct ancestor, it may be possible to go back in time without any paradoxical consequences at all.

Additional resources

• Watch a YouTube video about the science behind the grandfather paradox
• Take Ten Short Lessons in time travel from Brian Clegg
• Explore dozens of fictional time travel paradoxes at the Science Fiction Encyclopedia and TV Tropes

Bibliography

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction. https://sfdictionary.com/view/2178/grandfather-paradox

"Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2021. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds/ 

"Time Travel without the Paradoxes," New Scientist, 1992. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13318143-000-science-time-travel-without-the-paradoxes/

"The block universe theory, where time travel is possible but time passing is an illusion," Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2018. https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2018-09-02/block-universe-theory-time-past-present-future-travel/10178386 

"Experimental simulation of closed timelike curves," Nature Communications, 2014. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms5145 

"A Sound of Thunder," Ray Bradbury, Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/Planet_Stories_v06n04_1954-01/page/n5/mode/2up

"Simulating quantum 'time travel' disproves butterfly effect in quantum realm," Los Alamos National Laboratory, 2020. https://www.lanl.gov/discover/news-release-archive/2020/July/0728-quantum-time-travel.php

The evil eye is a human look believed to cause harm to someone or something. The supernatural harm may come in the form of a minor misfortune, or more serious disease, injury — even death. Folklorist Alan Dundes, in his edited volume "The Evil Eye: A Casebook" (University of Wisconsin Press, 1992) notes that "the victim's good fortune, good health, or good looks — or unguarded comments about them — invite or provoke an attack by someone with the evil eye ... Symptoms of illness caused by the evil eye include loss of appetite, excessive yawning, hiccups, vomiting and fever. If the object attacked is a cow, its milk may dry up; if a plant or fruit tree, it may suddenly wither and die." 

The evil eye is also said to cause a number of other maladies including insomnia, fatigue, depression and diarrhea, according to Armando R Favazza ("Bodies under Siege", John Hopkins University 1996). In many places, disease is considered a magical as well as a medical issue, and the reason a given person succumbs to a malady may be attributed to a curse instead of random chance or exposure to a virus. It can even affect objects and buildings, according to Robert Elsie ("A Dictionary of Albanian Culture", Hurst & Co Ltd, 2001) The evil eye cast upon a vehicle may break down irreparably, while a house so cursed may soon develop a leaky roof or an insect infestation. Just about anything that goes wrong may be blamed on the power of the evil eye. 

History of the evil eye

The evil eye is well known throughout history. It is mentioned in ancient Greek and Roman texts, as well as in many famous literary works, including the Bible (such as Proverbs 23:6: "Eat thou not the bread of him that hath an evil eye, neither desire thou his dainty meats") the Koran and Shakespeare's plays. Though belief in the evil eye is widespread, it is not universal. A 1976 cross-cultural survey by folklorist John Roberts found that 36 percent of cultures believed in the evil eye, according to Anthony H Galt in his paper "The Evil Eye as Synthetic and its Meanings on the Island of Pantelleria, Italy" (The American Ethnological Society, 1982). 

The evil eye is essentially a specific type of magical curse, and has its roots in magical thinking and superstition. Let's say that a person experiences bad luck, ill health, accident, or some unexplained calamity — perhaps a drought or an infectious disease. Before science could explain weather patterns and germ theory, any bad event for which there was not an obvious cause might be blamed on a curse, according to the BBC. Curses, including the evil eye, are an answer to the age-old question of why bad things happen to good people.

Eyes are said to have special powers; they are said to be the gateway to a person's soul. Shifting eyes are said to subtly betray liars, while a steady gaze may be endearing or menacing depending on the circumstances. Eye contact can create an intensely personal connection, whether between lovers or superiors and subordinates. Glaring or intense staring can convey power and authority over another. Of course, actors use their eyes to convey a wide range of emotions, including love, hate, disgust, boredom, scorn, surprise and envy. In fact it is jealousy that underlies the evil eye's cultural association with magic. 

Belief in the power of the eyes is so powerful that any eye affliction has come to suggest evil and bad luck. People who are cross-eyed, have uncontrollable eye twitches or spasms (a condition called blepharospasm), or who merely have a prominent squint have been shunned and feared as provoking bad luck, especially among those who work in dangerous occupations such as fishing and mining. Indeed, the "Oxford Handbook of Disability History" (Oxford University Press, 2017) quotes an ancient Greek text on Physiognomy which states: "The blind if obstinate, the one-eyed is frequently unjust and the squint eyed is regularly arrogant".  Similarly, those with unusually close-set eyes or eyes of different colors were often suspected of having the evil eye. 

Babies and children are said to be especially susceptible to harm from the evil eye, and in many countries, including Greece, Romania, and India, praising a child publicly is sometimes considered taboo, for the compliment will draw the attention of the evil eye. In order to ward off the evil eye, parents of a thoughtlessly praised child may ask the person who gave the compliment to immediately spit in the child's face. 

Because the momentarily exalted youngster has been brought down a peg, any harm by the evil eye is unnecessary; this spittle salve is harmless yet insulting enough to negate the compliment, according to GreekCityTimes. According to, Anthony H Galt; "Babies and children are also protected with abitini pinned inside their clothing, which on Pantelleria consist of small bags of red cloth (sometimes heart-shaped) that look like pincushions and contain a figurinu (saint card), a small gold horn, or a crab claw, and a bit of red cloth or a piece of iron". 

Who has the evil eye? Maybe you do. Many believe that bad intention is not necessary, and that some people can cast an evil eye without even knowing it. If one person is believed to have the evil eye, other members of  their family are often treated with suspicion — and any children are assumed to have the curse as well. 

Evil eye protections, cures and amulets

The best way to deal with the evil eye is to avoid it in the first place. The method varies by culture, geographic region, and personal preference. In Latin America the evil eye is known as "mal de ojo," and belief in it is especially widespread in rural areas. In Cuba , for example, newborns are often given a good luck charm called an azabache to protect them from the evil eye, according to Lucky-Charms.org .

Amulets can be worn to deter the evil eye, often using the color blue (symbolizing heaven or godliness) and an eye symbol. According to Town and Country Magazine, Meghan Markle can often be seen wearing one and are often featured in contemporary jewelry designs. Charms, potions and spells can also be prepared; garlic can be used to deter the evil eye, and some believe that just saying the word "garlic" offers protection, according to Robert A Georges in his paper "Matiasma: Living Folk Belief" in Midwest Folklore. 

Often those who believe they have been harmed by the evil eye will seek out shamans, witch doctors, psychics or other spiritual healers to remove the curse. There are several ways to cure mal de ojo; one traditional method from Mexico involves the use of a raw egg. The egg, a universal symbol of purity and birth, is said to absorb evil energies as it passes over the forehead and prone body of the victim, in the form of the cross, according to Mary Caroline Montaño ("Tradiciones Nuevomexicanas: Hispano Arts and Culture of New Mexico", University of New Mexico Press, 2001). The egg is then broken over a bowl of water and the resulting forms closely examined for any unusual shapes. An oval or eye shape seen in the yolk or whites is said to indicate that the evil eye's power has been successfully removed from the victim. 

It is tempting to view the evil eye as an ancient, discredited belief that plays no role in our 21st-century world. Instead, as folklorist Dundes notes, we "should keep in mind that the evil eye is not some old-fashioned superstitious belief of interest solely to antiquarians. The evil eye continues to be a powerful factor affecting the behavior of countless millions of people throughout the world." 

Though belief in the evil eye can be a harmless superstition, it can also be dangerous in some circumstances. Any time one person believes that another has harmed them — whether naturally or supernaturally, intentionally or accidentally — there is the potential for deadly retribution. Like other accused witches and sorcerers over the centuries, many people have been attacked, beaten, and killed for casting an evil eye. 

Additional resources

The New York Times traces the origins of the symbol and its connection to the curse, before discussing in depth its proliferation in jewelry. Evil - Eye store meanwhile, provides a range of amulets which can be purchased, should you wish to protect yourself from any potential curse, as well as containing the history of the symbol. 

Bibliography

• Folklorist Alan Dundes "The Evil Eye: A Casebook" (University of Wisconsin Press, 1992)
• Armando R Favazza "Bodies under Siege" (John Hopkins University 1996)
• Robert Elsie ("A Dictionary of Albanian Culture", Hurst & Co Ltd, 2001)
• Anthony H Galt "The Evil Eye as Synthetic and its Meanings on the Island of Pantelleria, Italy" (The American Ethnological Society, 1982)
• Quinn Hargitai, "The Strange power of the Evil Eye", BBC, 19th February 2019
• "Oxford Handbook of Disability History" (Oxford University Press, 2017) 
• Despina Karpathiou "Ftou Ftou: Why Do Greeks Associate Spitting With Good Luck", GreekCityTimes, August 10 2020
• Stellene Volandes "The History of the Evil Eye, an Ancient Symbol of Protection", Town&Country magazine, 14th May 2020
• Robert A Georges "Matiasma: Living Folk Belief" Midwest Folklore, Summer 1962
• Mary Caroline Montaño "Tradiciones Nuevomexicanas: Hispano Arts and Culture of New Mexico" (University of New Mexico Press, 2001) 

Ghosts are both everywhere and nowhere, stories would have us believe. Their existence is constantly being investigated, but highly doubted, yet despite that healthy scepticism ghosts feature prominently in our culture. They are in television and film, from "Harry Potter" to "The Sixth Sense." Ghost stories are told around campfires and found on bookstore shelves, in both fiction and nonfiction sections. Around Halloween, pop-culture images of ghosts haunt nearly every store, and hang as decoration in homes.

Ghosts even influence some of our everyday customs, in ways we may not recognize. "People used to believe a sneeze caused someone to expel their soul out of their body, and so 'God bless you' or 'Bless you' was used as a protection against the devil snatching your soul," according to MIT. Here are some of the most famous ghosts of all time.

King Hamlet

Though ghosts appear in several of Shakespeare's plays (such as "Macbeth" and "Julius Caesar"), King Hamlet, often referred to simply as 'Ghost', is among the better known of the Bard's ghosts and plays an integral part in "Hamlet." His son, Prince Hamlet may be the central character in the play named after him, but without his father's ghost, there would be no story.

King Hamlet appears three times in the play, each time during the night. The ghost tells Hamlet that he was murdered by his treacherous brother Claudius, and asks Hamlet to avenge his death.

"The Ghost himself says he is on a visit from Purgatory (1.5.9–13), returning to the world of the living in order to right a wrong; that the Catholic position on ghosts," wrote Tzachi Zamir, philosopher and literary critic, in his book "Shakespeare's Hamlet: Philosophical Perspectives" (Oxford University Press, 2017).

The Flying Dutchman

The Flying Dutchman, the world's best-known non-human ghost, is a seventeenth-century merchant ship said to haunt the high seas. According to sea lore, the ship, which often appears as a hazy image or a strange light, is said to be a portent of bad luck and doom.

The story has been adapted many times, but one of the more common versions tells of a Dutch captain, named van der Decken, refusing to take safe harbor during a storm while traversing the Cape of Good Hope despite pleas from the crew and passengers. Instead the impudent captain challenged God to take them down. The ship was promptly cursed and in its ghost form is damned to never find port again. The "ghost ship" has been reported on the ocean from time to time, including appearing off the coast of South Africa in 1923. The Flying Dutchman most recently appeared in movie theaters across the country in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" films, captained by Davy Jones.

"The tale of the doomed Dutch ghost ship stems from a British literary tradition (eighteenth to nineteenth centuries)," wrote Theo Meder in "The Flying Dutchman and Other Folktales from the Netherlands" (Libraries Unlimited, 2007) and is likely tied up in the trading company competition between Dutch and British businesses in that era.

The Bell Witch

The events that allegedly happened at John Bell's Tennessee farm between 1817 and 1821 are said to be one of the classic American ghost tales. Bell shot at a strange animal on his farm, but the creature disappeared before it could be harmed. Several weeks later, the Bell family was tormented by a ghost that made terrifying sounds, shook the house, and physically attacked Bell's daughter Betsy. The spectral assaults continued for several years, and at one point Andrew Jackson is said to have dabbled in ghost hunting and did his own investigation.

Though some authors recount the Bell Witch tale as a true account, there is little evidence that it is anything other than a ghost story. Jackson, for example, never mentioned the Bell Witch case at all; it seems that the future president's role was created from thin air, possibly to lend the appearance of reality to the fictional tale. "From the late 1810s until the 1830s, Jackson's every move is fairly well documented," wrote KyL T. Cobb, Jr. in his book "Ghosts and Demons: The Truth of the Bell Witch" (Lulu.com, 2016). This casts further doubt on his involvement.

Casper

While Bloody Mary spends her time in the ghostly realms waiting to be summoned to dark bathrooms so she can scare kids, Casper, who is best known as "The Friendly Ghost", is the white-outlined, smiling ghost who tries not to scare people.

Casper was created by Seymour Reit and Joe Oriolo in the 1930s, later gaining fame in the Harvey comic book series. Casper was often joined by friends such as Wendy the Good Little Witch and Hot Stuff the Little Devil. The characters were made benign and kid-friendly with the addition of "good," "friendly," and "little" to their names. Even so, the topic of death in a property aimed at children has been questioned, even when Casper enjoyed a revival with a self-titled 1995 film, starring Bill Pullman and Christina Ricci.. "Critics questioned how appropriate it was to run moments of comedy and slapstick alongside issues of death and the afterlife," wrote Zachary Graves in "Ghosts: The Complete Guide to the Supernatural" (Canary Press, 2011).

Bloody Mary

"Bloody Mary...Bloody Mary...Bloody Mary..." With those words, many schoolchildren had their first experience with a ghost. According to folklore, Bloody Mary is a ghost of a woman who murdered her children long ago. If you want to see her, go into a bathroom (usually at school), turn the lights off, stand in front of a mirror, and repeat her name three times.

The 'game' of summoning Bloody Mary is particularly associated with teenagers. "Three functions of the ritual are identified: to actively challenge and conquer fears; to allow opportunities to increase peer group status; and to develop a mechanism for coping with the supernatural," wrote Gail de Vos in "What Happens Next? Contemporary Urban Legends and Popular Culture" (Libraries Unlimited, 2012).. Many either stare at their scared reflection in the dark mirror or lose their nerve after saying the second "Bloody Mary" and run from the bathroom. "Numerous students related their experiences, both positive and negative, with great glee while others hid their heads in terror at the very thought of calling her."

An updated version of the Bloody Mary legend was made into a horror film series "Candyman," recently remade in 2021, who is similarly summoned by repeating his name three times.

The Drury Lane Ghost

There are many theaters in the Covent Gardens district in London's West End. Plays have been produced in that area for over 300 years, and some of the world's greatest actors have appeared there. Yet one theater is better known more for its ghost than its productions.

There is actually more than one ghost said to haunt Drury Lane's halls and wings, including those of several actors. The most famous, however, is a "Man in Grey" seen as a nobleman carrying a sword. It's not uncommon for a theater to claim a resident ghost treading the boards, and the Drury Lane ghosts carry on their part of theater tradition.

"Everyone in the theatre had some kind of experience. They think they saw the Man in Grey, or they heard a door slam when there was no one in the building. Roger [Clarke, professional ghost hunter] took those stories more seriously than the ghosts: he did think the building had something going on, although it was difficult to say what," said actor Nigel Planer to journalist Andrew Dickson, writing for "The Guardian" in 2015.

The Vanishing Hitchhiker

A classic example of modern folklore, often associated with the United States, but with parallel tales elsewhere in the world, the Vanishing Hitchhiker is often depicted standing by the roadside and disappearing without a trace not long after being picked up. One classic version points to the hitchhiker being the ghost of a local resident, killed not far from their home, but it has likely changed over the decades.

"It acquired the newer automobile motif by the period of the Great Depression, and thereafter spawned a number of subtypes with greatly varied and oddly interlocking details, some of which themselves stemmed from earlier folk legends," wrote Jan Harold Brunvand in "The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings" (W. W. Norton & Company, 2003).

Sometimes the hitchhiker is imbued with the power of prophecy or is on an endless quest, not unlike the crew of the Flying Dutchman. "Updated and localized treatments of the legend continue to flourish in modern folklore, suggesting that the old ghost tale must have some important appeal to contemporary folk," wrote Brunvand.

The Ghost of Christmas Past

In Charles Dickens' famous novel "A Christmas Carol," cold-hearted miser Ebenezer Scrooge has a change of heart after being visited by several ghosts representing different eras of his life's Christmases (Past, Present, and Yet to Come).

Ghosts are often associated with life lessons and morality tales, and these spooks are no exception. The Ghost of Christmas Past sets Scrooge out on the road to rehabilitation by showing him visions of his past Christmases. 

Dickens is credited with helping to establish the concept of a Christmas spirit and may have been drawing on his own past and feelings about children and Christmas for this character. "Dickens had warm memories of his own childhood Christmases and, now the father of a young family […] made the annual event a merry holiday. Feasting, games, and domestic dramas were the order of the ‘twelve days of Christmas’ in the 1840s Dickens household," wrote John Sutherland, professor of Modern English Literature at University College London for The British Library in 2014.

The Murdered Peddler

One day, in the early 1840s in Hydesville, New York, a young peddler arrived at the home of a Mr. and Mrs. Bell to sell his housewares. He was invited into the home by the Bells' housekeeper and in fact stayed for some days. The maid was shortly dismissed from service but abruptly rehired a week later. The peddler was gone, but many of his items were now in use in the Bells' kitchen. The maid thought little of it until she began experiencing strange, ghostly phenomenon, only to find out from the peddler's ghost that he had in fact been murdered in her absence.

At least that was the story told by two sisters named Maggie and Katie Fox, who claimed to communicate with the ghost. Years later, the sisters admitted it had all been a hoax; there was no murdered peddler, and the spirit communications had been faked. Still, the sisters had inadvertently founded a religion called Spiritualism, which is still practiced today. The Murdered Peddler is the only fake ghost whose presence started a real religion.

"When Spiritualism began, with its murdered peddler and its poltergeists, it had fed on an older fascination with occult powers. But Spiritualism as shaped by and in response to the Fox sisters had emerged as something sunnier, more democratic," wrote Barbara Weisberg in "Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism" (HarperOne, 2005). "One gathered a group of friends or hired a large hall to welcome the immortal beings. While benign spirit guides weren't necessarily unknown in other parts of the world, they descended like uninvited but cheery guests on nineteenth-century Christian America."

Slimer

Slimer is the grotesque green ghost featured in the "Ghostbuster" films and cartoons. He's characterised by his bright green appearance, obnoxious and slovenly behaviour, and his ability to spew slime. Slimer proved to be so popular with kids that he got a starring role in the spin-off cartoon series "The Real Ghostbusters." A reformed evil ghost that joined the Ghostbusters team, Slimer's voracious appetite and guttural burps make him among the most memorable cartoon ghosts.

Originally referred to as 'Onionhead' in production of the original movie, Slimer was likened to an actor known well by the film's writers and stars Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis. "Ivan [Reitman, director] remarked that the character was sort of like Bluto in Animal House – like the ghost of John Belushi, in a way, Danny, who was obviously a good friend of John's, never argued with that. Even so, we never officially said that and we never mentioned it in the script. It was just one way to look at the character because Onionhead's grossness is like Bluto's in Animal House," said Joe Medjuck, producer of Ghostbusters, in "Making Ghostbusters" (New York Zoetrope, 1985), edited by Don Shay.

Additional resources and reading

If you would like to learn about some 'real' ghost ships that have risen from the ocean you should read about these WWII ships that arose after a volcanic eruption.

And you'll find out that telling ghost stories really is something that goes back to the earliest human settlements as shown by this Babylonian exorcism tablet, identified in 2021.

Bibliography

"Why Americans say “Bless you!” when they hear someone sneeze," MIT
"Shakespeare's Hamlet: Philosophical Perspectives" by Tzachi Zamir (Oxford University Press, 2017)
"The Flying Dutchman and Other Folktales from the Netherlands" by Theo Meder (Libraries Unlimited, 2007)
"Ghosts and Demons: The Truth of the Bell Witch" by KyL T. Cobb, Jr. (Lulu.com, 2016)
"Ghosts: The Complete Guide to the Supernatural" by Zachary Graves (Canary Press, 2011)
"What Happens Next? Contemporary Urban Legends and Popular Culture" by Gail de Vos (Libraries Unlimited, 2012)
"Inside the world's most haunted theatre," by Andrew Dickson, "The Guardian"
"The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings" by Jan Harold Brunvand (W. W. Norton & Company, 2003)
"The origins of A Christmas Carol," by John Sutherland, The British Library
"Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism" by Barbara Weisberg (HarperOne, 2005)
"Making Ghostbusters" (New York Zoetrope, 1985), edited by Don Shay

Dragons are among the most popular and enduring of the world's mythological creatures, believed to have been real for centuries. 

Dragon tales are known in many cultures, from the Americas to Europe, and from India to China. They have a long and rich history in many forms and continue to populate our books, films and television shows, as brave heroes routinely fight to slay the beasts.

It's not clear when or where stories of dragons first emerged, but the huge, flying serpents were described at least as early as the age of the ancient Greeks and Sumerians. According to Scott G. Bruce in his introduction to “The Penguin Book of Dragons” (Penguin Classics, 2021), "In the ancient world they took the form of enormous serpents, ready to crush with their coils and kill with their venomous breath." For much of history dragons were thought of as being like any other mythical animal: sometimes useful and protective, other times harmful and dangerous.

That changed when Christianity spread across the world; dragons took on a decidedly sinister interpretation and came to represent Satan. In medieval times, most people who heard anything about dragons knew them from the Bible, and it's likely that most Christians at the time believed in the literal existence of dragons. After all, Leviathan — the massive monster described in detail in the Book of Job, chapter 41 — sounds like a dragon:

"Its back has rows of shields tightly sealed together; each is so close to the next that no air can pass between. They are joined fast to one another; they cling together and cannot be parted. Its snorting throws out flashes of light; its eyes are like the rays of dawn. Flames stream from its mouth; sparks of fire shoot out. Smoke pours from its nostrils as from a boiling pot over burning reeds. Its breath sets coals ablaze, and flames dart from its mouth."

Related: Top 10 beasts and dragons: How reality made myth

The belief in dragons was based not just in legend but also in hard evidence, or at least that's what people thought, long ago. For millennia no one knew what to make of the giant bones that were occasionally unearthed around the globe, and dragons seemed a logical choice for people who had no knowledge of dinosaurs.

Different types of dragons

Though most people can easily picture a dragon, people's ideas and descriptions of dragons vary dramatically, according to Grunge. Some dragons have wings; others don't. Some dragons can speak or breathe fire; others can't. Some are only a few feet long; others span miles. Some dragons live in palaces under the ocean, while others can only be found in caves and inside mountains, such as Smaug in JRR Tolkein's "The Hobbit."

As folklorist Carol Rose's book "Giants, Monsters, & Dragons: An Encyclopedia of Folklore, Legend, and Myth" (Norton, 2001), dragons "have composite features from many other beasts, such as the head of an elephant in India, that of a lion or bird of prey in the Middle East, or numerous heads of reptiles such as serpents. Their body color may range from green, red, and black to unusually yellow, blue or white dragons."

Zoologist Karl Shuker describes a wide variety of dragons in his book "Dragons: A Natural History" (Simon & Schuster, 1995), including giant snakes, hydras, gargoyles and dragon-gods, and the more obscure variants such as basilisks, wyverns and cockatrices. At its root, the is a chameleon — its features adapting to the cultural and literary expectations of the era.

Dragons continue to capture the public's imagination in fantasy books and films, appearing in everything from the kid-friendly 2010 film "How to Train Your Dragon," to the more adult-oriented "Game of Thrones" books and TV series and "The Hobbit" book and movies. The popular role-playing game Advanced Dungeons and Dragons describes more than a dozen varieties of dragons, each with unique personalities, powers and other characteristics. (Black dragons, for example, are fond of eels — who knew?)

Origins of dragons

The word "dragon" comes from the ancient Greek word "draconta," meaning "to watch," suggesting that the beast guards treasure, such as mountains of gold coins or gems, according to Dean Miller in "Legendary Creatures and Monsters" (Cavendish Square Publishing, 2014). But this doesn't really make sense because a creature as powerful as a dragon surely doesn't need to pay for anything, right? It's probably more of a symbolic treasure, not for the hoarding dragon but instead a reward for the brave warriors, such as the Knights of Camelot who would vanquish the evil beast.

Dragons are one of the few monsters cast in mythology primarily as a powerful and fearsome opponent to be slain. They don't simply exist for their own sake; they exist largely as a foil for bold adventurers. Other mythical beasts such as trolls, elves and fairies interact with people (sometimes mischievously, sometimes helpfully) but their main role is not as a combatant.

The Christian church created legends of righteous and godly saints battling and vanquishing Satan in the form of dragons. The most celebrated of these was St. George the Dragon Slayer, who in legend comes upon a town threatened by a terrible dragon, according to English Heritage. He rescues a fair maiden, protects himself with the sign of the cross and slays the beast. The town's citizens, impressed by St. George's feat of faith and bravery, immediately convert to Christianity.

Vanquishing a dragon was not only an important career opportunity for any ambitious saint, knight or hobbit, but according to legend it was also a way to raise armies. As Michael Page and Robert Ingpen note in their book "Encyclopedia of Things That Never Were"(Viking Penguin, 1987), "The use of dragon's teeth provides a simple method of expanding the armed forces of any country. It was first practiced by Cadmus, King of Thebes. First, prepare a piece of ground as though for sowing grain. Next, catch and kill any convenient dragon and draw all its teeth. Sow these in the furrows you have prepared, cover lightly, and stand well away." Easy, peasy, right?

Next, veteran warriors "clad in bronze armor and armed with swords and shields ... emerge rapidly from the earth and stand in ranks according to the way in which the dragon's teeth were sown." Apparently these draconis dentata soldiers are a quarrelsome lot and will turn on each other lacking a ready enemy, so if you plan to do this, be sure your adversaries are nearby.

Scholars believe that the fire-breathing element of dragons came from medieval depictions of the mouth of hell; for example, art by Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, among others. The entrance to hell was often depicted as a monster's literal mouth, with the flames and smoke characteristic of Hades belching out. If one believes not only in the literal existence of hell, but also the literal existence of dragons as Satanic, the association is quite logical.

Are dragons real?

Medieval theology aside, few people today believe in the literal existence of dragons in the way they may believe in the existence of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster, for example. The dragon (or at least the dragon version most familiar to Westerners) is simply too big and too fantastic to take seriously or literally. In the modern age of satellite imagery and smart phone photos and videos, it's simply implausible that any giant, winged fire-breathers inhabit Earth's lands or skies unseen.

However, only a few centuries ago rumors of dragons seemed to have been confirmed by eyewitness accounts from sailors returning from Indonesia who reported encountering dragons — Komodo dragons, a type of monitor lizard — which can be aggressive, deadly, and reach 10 feet (3 meters) in length. 

In a possible parallel to dragons, it was previously believed that the bite of a Komodo dragon was especially deadly because of toxic bacteria in its mouth, though that myth was debunked in 2013 by a team of researchers from the University of Queensland who discovered that the Komodo dragon's mouths are no dirtier than those of other carnivores. Western scientists only verified the existence of the Komodo dragon around 1910 following the investigation of Lieutenant Jacques Karel Henri van Steyn van Hensbroek and Pieter Ouwens, according to The Guardian, but rumors and stories of these fearsome beasts circulated long before that.

Dragons, in one form or another, have been around for millennia. Through epic fantasy fiction by J.R.R. Tolkien and others, dragons have continued to spark our collective imagination and show no sign of dying out.

Additional resources

To find out more about Komodo Dragons, this article from the University of Queensland, has a group of researchers discussing the fascinating detail of their mouths. To discover more about the story of St. George, read this entry from the Catholic Encyclopedia.

Bibliography

• Scott G Bruce, “The Penguin Book of Dragons”, (Penguin, 2021)
• Book of Job, https://www.biblestudytools.com/job/41-1.html
• Joseph A Williams, What Dragons Look Like Around The World, Grunge 2021, https://www.grunge.com/462238/what-dragons-look-like-around-the-world/
• Carol Rose, Giants, Monsters, & Dragons: An Encyclopedia of Folklore, Legend, and Myth" (Norton, 2001)
• 9 Things You Didn’t Know About St George, English Heritage, https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/whats-on/st-georges-day/9-things-you-didnt-know-about-st-george/
• Michael Page and Robert Ingpen, "Encyclopedia of Things That Never Were" (Viking Penguin, 1987)
• Hannake Meijer, Here Be Dragons: The Million Year Journey of the Komodo Dragon, The Guardian, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/may/17/here-be-dragons-the-million-year-journey-of-the-komodo-dragon 

The jackalope, an animal with the body of a jackrabbit and the antlers of an antelope or deer, is a cultural icon of the American West. The image of the creature is sold on all sorts of knickknacks in the region, from postcards to shot glasses. At one point, tourists could even buy taxidermied and mounted jackalopes for $35 or less.

But is the jackalope real, or is it a myth?

Although no such hybrid animal exists, there's an element of truth in the legend, said Michael Branch, a professor of literature and environment at the University of Nevada, Reno and author of the book "On the Trail of the Jackalope: How a Legend Captured the World's Imagination and Helped Us Cure Cancer" (Pegasus Books, 2022). 

"It's a mythological creature," he told Live Science. "But it does bear a real relationship to horned rabbits in nature that are stricken with papillomavirus."

Related: What's the difference between rabbits and hares?

Rabbits don't naturally grow horns. But the rabbit papillomavirus can make them do so. Papillomaviruses are common in many species, and each type typically infects members of a specific host species, Branch said. A prime example is the human papillomavirus, or HPV.

When the rabbit papillomavirus infects a rabbit, it can cause the growth of a benign tumor out of its face or head that sometimes resembles antlers or horns. Sometimes, the tumor — made of keratin, the same protein that forms fingernails and hair — grows on other body parts, but it's most common on the head, Branch said. The tumors can become malignant in some rabbits.

However, these growths don't always look like antlers. They're often black and asymmetrical, and not nearly as majestic as the antlers of the jackalope. "It's pretty grotesque, to tell you the truth," Branch said. "Depending on how severe the disease is in the rabbit, it can look pretty horrendous." 

In 1933, an American virologist named Richard Shope discovered that the rabbit papillomavirus, shortly thereafter named the Shope papillomavirus, caused infected rabbits to grow features resembling horns, according to a 2015 study in the journal PLOS One. Until then, most scientists didn't believe that a virus could cause cancer. There was some evidence that viruses could cause cancer in birds. But researchers were skeptical, and most certainly didn't think that it could happen in a mammal, Branch said. The horned rabbit proved them wrong. 

"It opened up lots of avenues of research to look into what other cancers might be caused by viruses and eventually to work toward the development of a vaccine against them," he said. Specifically, it allowed researchers to begin creating the HPV vaccine, which can reduce the risk of cervical cancer and several other cancers.

Not all rabbits that are infected with the Shope papillomavirus grow horns, just like not all humans with HPV develop cancer. But in the rabbits that do, the disease is often fatal. The horns can disrupt the animals' ability to eat, and they may starve to death, Branch said.

The horned rabbit may have inspired the jackalope myth, but that's far from certain, Branch said. The jackalope originated with two teenage brothers in Douglas, Wyoming. "So far as we know, these young boys invented this thing on their own," Branch said. They were hunters and amateur taxidermists, and they sold their first mounted jackalope to a hotel owner in the 1930s. 

This timing is an odd coincidence, Branch said. "Right when these two young boys were creating this joke, this hoax mount of a jackalope in Wyoming, at almost the same moment, Shope was at the Rockefeller Institute [for Medical Research] in Princeton, New Jersey, in his lab, working on horned rabbits."

Originally published on Live Science.

Between 1692 and 1693, accusations of witchcraft were made in and around the town of Salem in Massachusetts, leading to the  arrests of about 150 people. These charges were taken seriously, and the ensuing trials resulted in the executions of 19 people. 

But how were these "witches" executed? Were any burned alive at the stake, a common punishment for convicted witches in Europe? After all, at the time Salem was part of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, an English colony.

The answer is no; witches in England’s American colonies were killed another way.

"At Salem no one was burned. Instead, they hanged them," said Elizabeth Reis, a professor at Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York and author of the book "Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England" (Cornell University Press, 1999). 

Related: When did humans discover how to use fire?

England and its American colonies were an anomaly during that period, at least when it came to burning those accused of witchcraft. "Burning at the stake was not used as a method of execution for convicted witches in Salem or anywhere in the American colonies or England," said Emerson Baker, a history professor at Salem State University who wrote the book "A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience" (Oxford University Press, 2014).

"In England and her colonies, witchcraft was tried in criminal courts, like any other capital crime. And the punishment for capital crimes was death by hanging," Baker told Live Science in an email. "Meanwhile, on the European continent, witch cases tended to be tried by ecclesiastical courts [a court run by the church]. When people were accused of witchcraft before an ecclesiastical court, it was treated as heresy. The punishment for someone convicted of heresy was burning at the stake,"  Baker said.

The ecclesiastical courts in continental Europe saw burning at the stake as a way to purify the soul. "Burning was supposedly a way to purify the convict, and also as a threat to uncover conspiracies," said Peter Hoffer, a distinguished research professor of history at the University of Georgia and author of the book "The Salem Witchcraft Trials: A Legal History" (University Press of Kansas, 1997). Church authorities in Europe sometimes feared that people would make conspiracies with the devil against them. 

Burial and memorial

Recent historical research has identified a site now called "Proctor's Ledge" as being the place where the convicted were hanged at Salem. In 2017, Salem erected a memorial for the people who were executed at the site. 

The bodies of those hanged were dumped in a location near Proctor's Ledge. "An eye witness account says the bodies were dumped into shallow rocky crevices in the ledge under the shallow soil. There are references to several bodies being removed at night by family members and buried at their homes," said Benjamin Ray, a professor emeritus of religious studies at the University of Virginia who wrote the book "Satan and Salem: The Witch-Hunt Crisis of 1692" (University of Virginia Press, 2015). 

Ray noted that attempts have been made to find the bodies of those hanged, but so far they have been unsuccessful. "Ground penetrating radar indicates there are only these crevices, little space for bodies, and none have been discovered," Ray told Live Science in an email. 

Originally published on Live Science.

When a UFO enthusiast posted an event on Facebook about "storming" the military base known as Area 51, he meant it as a joke. However, it was no laughing matter to federal and state law enforcement, who readied a lethal response to prevent revelers from breaching the off-limits area, records recently revealed. 

Area 51 is a U.S. Air Force installation in southern Nevada's Groom Lake, a salt flat about 80 miles (129 kilometers) northwest of Las Vegas. For decades, the base's remote location and restricted access have fueled speculation about military officials performing secret experiments on extraterrestrials there, and storing evidence of alien visitors and UFOs. 

The general public is barred from visiting Area 51. But during the summer of 2019, a Facebook event titled "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us" (now deleted) enticed nearly 2 million people to sign up for a raid on the base to take place on Sept. 20. The massive scale of the proposed event raised alarms at local and federal levels, according to government communications that were recently obtained by Rolling Stone. Dozens of law enforcement agencies mobilized and readied responses to the proposed onslaught, including "automated deadly force countermeasures," Rolling Stone reported Oct. 17. 

Related: 15 far-out facts about Area 51

The plan for "Storm Area 51", according to the Facebook post, was for attendees to gather in the Nevada desert near Area 51, charge the gates at sunrise and then, once inside, "see them aliens" and possibly conduct an extraterrestrial rescue operation, Live Science previously reported. Matty Roberts, then a 20-year-old college student in Bakersfield, California, created the post on June 27, and claimed "it was totally a joke from the get-go," Roberts told the BBC on Sept. 13, 2019.

But law enforcement agencies weren't amused; and they prepared accordingly.

"A certain portion of the participants may be armed and could expect armed conflict," read the Nevada Department of Public Safety Investigation Division's operational plan for the "Storm Area 51" event. The 2019 document was obtained by the nonpartisan government transparency group Property of the People and then shared with Rolling Stone. Hundreds of pages detailed law enforcement agencies' plans, situation reports, descriptions of transport for Area 51 employees, and maps of all entrances, Rolling Stone reported.

The document also described several unnamed YouTubers' attempts to track employees as they entered and left the base, according to Rolling Stone.

Even if most of the "Storm Area 51" attendees weren't seriously planning to invade a restricted military site, "there is a potential for domestic and foreign terrorist groups to utilize this event to test the security of sensitive national security sites by infiltrating the groups planning to storm the facility," the plan read. Harsh conditions in the Nevada desert — the threat of wildfires, lack of water and extreme temperature fluctuations — could worsen an already volatile situation, sowing panic and increasing the possibility of "mass casualties," according to the report.

In the end, online interest in raiding the base petered out, and Roberts canceled "Storm Area 51" with just nine days to spare. As an alternative, he urged people to instead visit "Alienstock," a UFO-celebrating festival in Las Vegas; nonetheless, a few thousand people still gathered in the town of Rachel, Nevada, about a 20-minute drive from Area 51's entrance, on the appointed day, The Guardian reported on Sept. 24, 2019. 

However, most of the assembled throng were busy documenting their presence for viewers on YouTube and Instagram, and none broke down the gates to find hidden evidence of UFOs, according to the Guardian. 

Originally published on Live Science.

Extrasensory perception (ESP) is an unproven paranormal phenomenon in which people allegedly receive information about, or exert control over, their environment in ways that don't use the five senses. Also known as "the sixth sense" or "psi," ESP refers to a wide range of purported abilities, including telepathy (mind reading), psychokinesis (moving objects without physical contact) and precognition (predicting the future).

ESP violates our understanding of basic scientific principles. Still, estimates suggest that around two-thirds of people in the United States believe in its existence, according to a 2019 study published in Europe's Journal of Psychology. Even in academia, ESP has inspired serious scientific debate. While some psychologists argue that the subject deserves consideration, skeptics point out that the evidence is weak at best, and fraudulent at worst. 

History of ESP

Fascination with ESP is rooted in the spiritualist movement of 19th-century Britain and the United States, according to the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Members of the fashionable elite would hold séances, in which mediums would attempt to communicate with spirits. By the end of the 19th century, scientists and other thinkers were joining research societies devoted to studying not only communication with spirits, but a whole host of so-called "psychic" phenomena, including telepathy and hypnosis (which, unlike telepathy and séances, is now backed by science). In 1882, the Society for Psychical Research emerged in London, and in 1885, people founded a corresponding society in the United States. (Both still exist today.)

Related: How does hypnosis work?

The term "extrasensory perception" was not widely used until the 1930s, when Duke University psychologist J.B. Rhine opened a lab devoted to studying the sixth sense. Rhine became famous for his work with decks of "Zener cards," each of which was marked with one of five symbols. He would flip through a deck containing 25 of these cards and have study participants identify the symbol on each without seeing the card itself, according to the American Psychological Association. Theoretically, the average person had a 1 in 5, or 20%, chance of guessing the identity of each card. But Rhine found that people consistently guessed the correct card more than 20% of the time. Based on this result, he surmised that he had found evidence for ESP, Terence Hines wrote in the book "Pseudoscience and the Paranormal" (Prometheus, 2003). 

Rhine's research, which he published in a book titled "Extrasensory Perception" (Boston Society for Psychic Research, 1934), generated both criticism and interest. One review of the book, published that same year in the journal Nature, insinuated that Rhine's strong belief in ESP might have biased his results. But Rhine's research also fueled the growth of the new field of parapsychology. In 1957, he formed the Parapsychological Association, an organization devoted to studying psychic experiences, which still exists today.

Related: Are ghosts real?

Does extrasensory perception exist?

Since parapsychology took off, some scientists have devoted their careers to investigating the existence of ESP. This research hasn't just taken place on the fringes; between 1972 and 1995, the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), spent $20 million on ESP-related research efforts conducted largely at Stanford Research Institute, according to a 2015 article published in the journal SAGE Open. The program, later nicknamed "Stargate," was devoted to ESP applications in the Cold War. 

Today, ESP research appears alongside orthodox psychology research in high-profile, peer-reviewed journals, including American Psychologist and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Many of these studies appear to provide evidence for the existence of ESP.

In the 1970s, researchers began conducting ganzfeld experiments, in which participants would sit in darkened rooms with their eyes covered, listening to white noise. The goal was to deprive the participants of sensory stimuli, making it easier to focus on ESP messages. 

The researchers would ask participants to focus on whatever images floated into their minds while a "sender," sitting in another room, viewed a "target" video clip or image and attempted to transmit the information to the participant. Afterward, the study participants would view a set of images, one of which was the target. If they selected the target image, it was considered a "hit." Similar to the results of Rhine's earlier research, a review article aggregating the results of dozens of these studies found that people consistently selected the target more often than one would expect based on chance.

One of the best-known and most controversial figures in ESP research today is Daryl Bem, a professor of psychology at Cornell University. In 2011, he published a paper in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that appeared to demonstrate evidence for precognition, or the ability to predict the future. He conducted nine standard psychological experiments, with well-established psychological effects — but did them in reverse. 

For example, he would show participants a long list of words, and would have them memorize as many as possible and then repeat what they remembered. Later, he would give them a subset of those words to "practice" by copying them out. Participants remembered more of the words they would later practice than those they didn't. In other words, it appeared that precognition helped participants "remember" words based on their future practice. Bem has since received widespread criticism for using study methods known to encourage false positive results.

Scientific controversy over ESP

There's a major problem with ESP research: You can't replicate it. "In science, if you discover something and claim it as a fact, then other scientists following similar procedures should find the same thing," said James Alcock, a professor of psychology at York University in Toronto. "[That] never happens with ESP." 

Sometimes, it may seem as if certain results — such as those from ganzfeld experiments — can be replicated, Alcock told Live Science. But if you look closely at these studies, you'll find slight differences in both the methods and the results. For example, one set of experiments might find that ganzfeld experiments work with photographs, and another study might add videos and find that the participants guess the videos correctly but not the photographs. No one seems to be able to repeat the exact same experiment and get identical results. "Scientists can't do it again," Alcock said. "They can't do it when the conditions are tight." 

In addition, skeptics point out that results that appear to provide evidence for ESP aren't actually much different from what you'd expect based on chance. For example, one of Bem's studies asked participants to select one of two windows, both of which were hidden behind curtains. Behind one window was a screen showing pornography. Bem hypothesized that if ESP were real, participants would pick that window more than half of the time. And they did — but only by a small margin: They selected the window hiding pornography 53% of the time, to be exact. 

This type of result is consistent across parapsychological research, said Jeffrey Rouder, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, Irvine. "If you really have ESP, you should be able to get it right maybe 65%, 80% of the time," Rouder said. After all, 3% better than chance is rather unremarkable. "At some point, you want to say, 'Hey, if this is real, just hit it out of the park!" 

Why so many people believe in ESP

Laypeople who believe in ESP typically cite anecdotal accounts and personal experiences as evidence for the phenomenon. People say they had visions of events that later happened or prophetic dreams; they claim that they always can predict when a particular family member is about to call. Some historical accounts, such as a novella that appeared to predict the sinking of the Titanic, also seem to provide anecdotal evidence for ESP's existence. 

But well-understood cognitive biases likely explain these accounts, according to a 2008 article published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. For example, people tend to perceive patterns in random series of events. So, when your best friend calls just moments after she popped into your mind, it feels like a sign — even though having two seemingly connected events occurring close in time has a high chance of happening randomly. 

People also look for examples to support the beliefs they already hold — a phenomenon called confirmation bias. Consciously or subconsciously, they disregard evidence to the contrary — such as the thousands of times your friend called when you weren't thinking of her or the times you were thinking of your friend and she didn't call.

So, the next time you're leaving on a trip and are suddenly overcome with an ominous feeling, don't jump to the conclusion that your anxiety is a premonition. Despite anecdotes of people predicting disasters, there's no evidence that your feeling is a warning about the future. And if a lesser disaster does happen — such as your flight getting canceled, leaving you stuck in the airport — that's not really precognition. That's just life. 

Additional resources

• Take a peek at the Federal Bureau of Investigation's archives to see how the agency looked into ESP as a way to investigate espionage.
• Read more about J.B. Rhine and his Zener cards from the American Psychological Association.
• Learn about the history of paranormal phenomena from the University of Canterbury. 

Earth — the blue marble — is our spherical home. But what if Earth were flat? After all, some people, called flat-earthers, truly believe in this retrograde idea. How would everyday life function? Would it function at all? We explore how much of an oddball, or "oddslice" Earth would be if it were flat and whether there are any advantages to living on a strange disk with the sun and moon rotating overhead like a cosmic carousel.  

 1. Say goodbye to gravity (at least as we know it) 

On spherical Earth, gravity tugs equally on objects no matter where in the world they are. For Earth to take the shape of a flat disk in the first place, gravity — as we know it — must be having no effect. If it did, it would soon pull the planet back into a spheroid. 

Maybe a flat-Earth would have no gravity at all, as a solid disk-like Earth would not be possible under actual gravity conditions, according to calculations in the 1850s by mathematician and physicist James Clerk Maxwell. 

Or perhaps on a flat-Earth, gravity would pull everything to the center of the disk — the North Pole. In that scenario, the farther away you are from the North Pole the more horizontal the gravitational tug toward the central point of the disk, according to James Davis, a geophysicist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. This would wreak havoc worldwide, but at least the world long jump record would be easily beaten (as long as you orientated yourself northward before taking off that is).  

 2. It would certainly clear the atmosphere 

With no gravity, flat-Earth would no longer be able to hold onto the layer of gases called the atmosphere. The force of gravity is what holds this veil around our planet. And without this protective blanket, Earth's skies would turn black because light emitted from the sun would no longer scatter as it enters Earth's atmosphere and paint the skies the familiar blue we see today. The loss of atmospheric pressure would expose plants and animals to the vacuum of space, leading to asphyxiation in seconds, Luis Villazon, a zoologist and educator, wrote in BBC Science Focus.

Without an atmosphere surrounding the planet, water would initially boil away in the vacuum of space. That's because water boils when its vapor pressure equals that of the atmosphere, so lower atmospheric pressure means lower boiling point. Without an atmosphere to help warm the planet, the surface temperature would also plummet causing any remaining water to quickly freeze. But it isn't all bad news, as deep-ocean organisms such as chemosynthetic bacteria that don't require oxygen might just survive. After all, such bacteria have endured long trips to space and lived to tell the tale. 

3. Cloudy with a chance of sideways rain  

If gravity pulled toward the center of the planetary disk, which in this case is the North Pole, precipitation would also gravitate toward that spot. This is because precipitation falls to Earth due to gravity and will therefore fall toward the point of strongest gravitational pull. 

Only at the center of the disk would weather behave as we know it on Earth — falling straight down. The farther out you travel, the more horizontal the precipitation would be. Water in rivers and seas would also flow toward the North Pole, meaning vast bulging oceans would collect at the center of the planet, leaving practically no water at the edges, according to Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. 

4. We would all get lost

It is likely that satellites would not exist if the Earth were flat, as they would have trouble orbiting a flat plane. "There are a number of satellite missions that society depends on that just wouldn't work," James Davis, a geophysicist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said in a statement "I cannot think of how GPS would work on a flat Earth," said Davis. 

We depend on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) for anything from the GPS services on your phone, to travel information and supermarket just-in-time stock management to make sure produce arrives as fresh and as quickly as possible. And critically, emergency services use GPS to locate callers from their phone signal, the satellite communications could possibly save your life. 

It's hard to imagine a world without GPS, suffice to say we'd be lost. On the upside, at least on flat-Earth humans would have the horizontal rain to point us in the right — well, north — direction. 

5.  Some journeys would take forever  

Longer travel times can be expected, not just due to no-GPS navigation issues, but also because of the distances we would need to travel. According to flat-Earth belief, the Arctic lies in the center of the planet and Antarctica forms a giant ice wall around the edge; this wall conveniently stops people from literally falling off the face of Earth. But if you are unable to fly around the globe and instead are forced to fly across it, then travel times would increase significantly. For example, to fly from Australia (which is one side of the flat-Earth map) to a McMurdo station in Antarctica (on the other side of the flat-Earth map), you would need to fly across the entire Arctic, as well as North and South America. You can also forget about trips across Antarctica (though this has been achieved many times on a spherical Earth), as that pesky ice wall would prevent such travel. 

6.  No more auroras and we'd all be roasted  

On spherical Earth, the swirling molten metal surrounding our iron core generates electric currents that in turn create our protective magnetic field which curves around the planet from one pole to the other, according to NASA. But on a flat Earth, without a solid core generating a magnetic field that protective layer — the magnetosphere — would cease to exist. And so would auroras. Also called the Northern Lights, these sky shows form when charged particles from the sun bump into oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the magnetosphere, where they release energy in the form of incredible aurora light shows. 

Even so, the absence of auroras would be the least of our worries, as Earth would no longer be protected from solar winds. Earth and everything on its surface would be bombarded with harmful solar radiation, leaving a barren world akin to our neighbor Mars, according to NASA. 

 7. We'd all have to share the same night sky 

A flat-Earth would not be split into hemispheres like it is on our current orb: So night and day wouldn't be flip-flopped depending on whether you're in the Northern or Southern hemisphere. Also, the night sky no matter where you stood on the planetary disk. It sure would make stargazing easier, as you wouldn't have to travel to a different hemisphere to tick off all the targets on your astronomy bucket list. But isn't that part of the fun? 

If we all shared one view of just one portion of the night sky, we'd miss out on the many ground-based discoveries that have been made due to our access to a 360-degree view of the observable universe from Earth. We'd have to solely rely on space-based telescopes to widen our view of the cosmos. 

8.  Hurricanes would be a thing of the past 

Every year, hurricanes (also called typhoons and cyclones depending on the location where they form) cause unprecedented damage. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey alone caused $125 billion (£90 billion) worth of damage to the U.S., according to NOAA. 

The devastating rotating nature of these tropical storms stems from Earth's coriolis effect, which causes storms in the Northern Hemisphere to rotate counterclockwise and those in the Southern Hemisphere to rotate clockwise. However, on stationary, flat-Earth, no coriolis effect would be generated. No coriolis means no hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones. This is also why we don't see these types of storms between five degrees north and south of the equator, as the magnitude of the coriolis effect is zero at the equator, according to NASA.  

Additional resources: 

90 Years of Our Changing Views of Earth

Why some people believe the Earth is flat

Why are things in space the shape that they are?

This article was updated August 23, 2021.

If you believe in ghosts, you're not alone. Cultures all around the world believe in spirits that survive death to live in another realm. In fact, ghosts are among the most widely believed of paranormal phenomenon: Millions of people are interested in ghosts. It's more than mere entertainment; A 2019 Ipsos poll found that 46% of Americans  say they truly believe in ghosts. (The nation is discerning in its undead beliefs; only 7% of respondents said they believe in vampires).

And about 18% of people say they have either seen a ghost or been in one's presence, according to a 2015 Pew Research study. Why do so many claim to have such brushes with the afterlife?

"One common cause may be pareidolia, the tendency for our brains to find patterns (especially human faces and figures) amongst ambiguous stimuli," Stephen Hupp, clinical psychologist and professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Told Live Science in an email. "One common example is when we see faces or figures in the clouds and another is when random shapes and shadows in a dark house look like a ghost," said Hupp, who is also the editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine.

But the idea that the dead remain with us in spirit is an ancient one, appearing in countless stories, from the Bible to "Macbeth." It even spawned a folklore genre: ghost stories. Belief in ghosts is part of a larger web of related paranormal beliefs, including near-death experience, life after death, and spirit communication. The belief offers many people comfort — who doesn't want to believe that our beloved but deceased family members aren't looking out for us, or with us in our times of need? 

People have tried to (or claimed to) communicate with spirits for ages; in Victorian England, for example, it was fashionable for upper-crust ladies to hold séances in their parlors after tea and crumpets with friends. Ghost clubs dedicated to searching for ghostly evidence formed at prestigious universities, including Cambridge and Oxford, and in 1882 the most prominent organization, the Society for Psychical Research, was established. A woman named Eleanor Sidgwick was an investigator (and later president) of that group, and could be considered the original female ghostbuster. In America during the late 1800s, many psychic mediums claimed to speak to the dead — but were later exposed as frauds by skeptical investigators such as Harry Houdini. 

Related: 10 Ghost stories that will haunt you for life

It wasn't until recently that ghost hunting became a widespread interest around the world. Much of this is due to the hit Syfy cable TV series "Ghost Hunters," which aired 230 episodes and found no good evidence for ghosts. 

The show spawned dozens of spinoffs and imitators, and it's not hard to see why the show is so popular: the premise is that anyone can look for ghosts. The two original stars were ordinary guys (plumbers, in fact) who decided to look for evidence of spirits. Their message: You don't need to be an egghead scientist, or even have any training in science or investigation. All you need is some free time, a dark place, and maybe a few gadgets from an electronics store. If you look long enough any unexplained light or noise might be evidence of ghosts.

That vague criteria for ghostly happenings is part of the reason why myths about the afterlife are more alive than ever.

The science and logic of ghosts

One difficulty in scientifically evaluating ghosts is that a surprisingly wide variety of phenomena are attributed to ghosts, from a door closing on its own, to missing keys, to a cold area in a hallway, to a vision of a dead relative. 

When sociologists Dennis and Michele Waskul interviewed ghost experiencers for their book "Ghostly Encounters: The Hauntings of Everyday Life" (Temple University Press, 2016) they found that "many participants were not sure that they had encountered a ghost and remained uncertain that such phenomena were even possible, simply because they did not see something that approximated the conventional image of a 'ghost.' Instead, many of our respondents were simply convinced that they had experienced something uncanny — something inexplicable, extraordinary, mysterious, or eerie." 

Thus, many people who go on record as claiming to have had a ghostly experience didn't necessarily see anything that most people would recognize as a classic "ghost," and in fact they may have had completely different experiences whose only common factor is that it could not be readily explained. 

"There are plenty of misunderstood phenomena that influence ghost sightings. For example, sleep paralysis in a recognized experience that leads to people feeling like they have seen a ghost, demon, or alien," Hupp said.

Personal experience is one thing, but scientific evidence is another matter. Part of the difficulty in investigating ghosts is that there is not one universally agreed-upon definition of what a ghost is. Some believe that they are spirits of the dead who for whatever reason get "lost" on their way to The Other Side; others claim that ghosts are instead telepathic entities projected into the world from our minds.

Still others create their own special categories for different types of ghosts, such as poltergeists, residual hauntings, intelligent spirits and shadow people. Of course, it's all made up, like speculating on the different races of fairies or dragons: there are as many types of ghosts as you want there to be.

There are many contradictions inherent in ideas about ghosts. For example, are ghosts material or not? Either they can move through solid objects without disturbing them, or they can slam doors shut and throw objects across the room. According to logic and the laws of physics, it's one or the other. If ghosts are human souls, why do they appear clothed and with (presumably soulless) inanimate objects like hats, canes, and dresses — not to mention the many reports of ghost trains, cars and carriages?

If ghosts are the spirits of those whose deaths were unavenged, why are there unsolved murders, since ghosts are said to communicate with psychic mediums, and should be able to identify their killers for the police? The questions go on and on — just about any claim about ghosts raises logical reasons to doubt it.

Ghost hunters use many creative (and dubious) methods to detect the spirits' presences, often including psychics. Virtually all ghost hunters claim to be scientific, and most give that appearance because they use high-tech scientific equipment such as Geiger counters, Electromagnetic Field (EMF) detectors, ion detectors, infrared cameras and sensitive microphones. Yet none of this equipment has ever been shown to actually detect ghosts. 

"If someone hands you an electronic device to sense a ghost, then they’re probably doing it to get your money during a ghost tour," Hupp said.

For centuries, people believed that flames turned blue in the presence of ghosts. Today, few people accept that bit of lore, but it's likely that many of the signs taken as evidence by today's ghost hunters will be seen as just as wrong and antiquated centuries from now. 

Other researchers claim that the reason ghosts haven't been proven to exist is that we simply don't have the right technology to find or detect the spirit world. But this, too, can't be correct: Either ghosts exist and appear in our ordinary physical world (and can therefore be detected and recorded in photographs, film, video and audio recordings), or they don't. If ghosts exist and can be scientifically detected or recorded, then we should find hard evidence of that — yet we don't. If ghosts exist but cannot be scientifically detected or recorded, then all the photos, videos, audio and other recordings claimed to be evidence of ghosts cannot be ghosts. With so many basic contradictory theories — and so little science brought to bear on the topic — it's not surprising that despite the efforts of thousands of ghost hunters on television and elsewhere for decades, not a single piece of hard evidence of ghosts has been found.

And, of course, with the recent development of "ghost apps" for smartphones, it's easier than ever to create seemingly spooky images and share them on social media, making separating fact from fiction even more difficult for ghost researchers. 

Why do people believe in ghosts?

Most people who believe in ghosts do so because of some personal experience; they grew up in a home where the existence of (friendly) spirits was taken for granted, for example, or they had some unnerving experience on a ghost tour or local haunt. 

Belief in a spirit world may also fulfill a deeper psychological need.

"There’s still so much to this universe that we don’t understand, and it’s comforting to fill in the void with explanations. Supernatural explanations are often stated with confidence, even when there’s no actual evidence, and this confidence provides a false sense of actual truth," Hupp said.

For instance, some claim that support for the existence of ghosts can be found in no less a hard science than modern physics. It is widely claimed that Albert Einstein suggested a scientific basis for the reality of ghosts, based on the First Law of Thermodynamics: If energy cannot be created or destroyed but only change form, what happens to our body's energy when we die? Could that somehow be manifested as a ghost?

It seems like a reasonable assumption — until you dig into the basic physics. The answer is very simple, and not at all mysterious. After a person dies, the energy in his or her body goes where all organisms' energy goes after death: into the environment. The energy is released in the form of heat, and the body is transferred into the animals that eat us (i.e., wild animals if we are left unburied, or worms and bacteria if we are interred), and the plants that absorb us. There is no bodily "energy" that survives death to be detected with popular ghost-hunting devices.

Related: Top 10 most famous ghosts

While amateur ghost hunters like to imagine themselves on the cutting edge of ghost research, they are really engaging in what folklorists call ostension or legend tripping. It's basically a form of playacting in which people "act out" a legend, often involving ghosts or supernatural elements. In his book "Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live" (University Press of Mississippi, 2003) folklorist Bill Ellis points out that ghost hunters themselves often take the search seriously and "venture out to challenge supernatural beings, confront them in consciously dramatized form, then return to safety. ... The stated purpose of such activities is not entertainment but a sincere effort to test and define boundaries of the 'real' world."

If ghosts are real, and are some sort of as-yet-unknown energy or entity, then their existence will (like all other scientific discoveries) be discovered and verified by scientists through controlled experiments — not by weekend ghost hunters wandering around abandoned, supposedly haunted houses in the dark late at night with cameras and flashlights.

In the end (and despite mountains of ambiguous photos, sounds, and videos) the evidence for ghosts is no better today than it was a century ago. There are two possible reasons for the failure of ghost hunters to find good evidence. The first is that ghosts don't exist, and that reports of ghosts can be explained by psychology, misperceptions, mistakes and hoaxes. The second option is that ghosts do exist, but that ghost hunters do not possess the scientific tools or mindset to uncover any meaningful evidence. 

But ultimately, ghost hunting is not about the evidence at all (if it was, the search would have been abandoned long ago). Instead, it's about having fun with friends and family members, telling stories, and the enjoyment of pretending to search the edge of the unknown. After all, everyone loves a good ghost story.

Additional resources

• The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry promotes scientific inquiry, critical investigation and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims.
• Experiments suggest that children can distinguish fantasy from reality, but are tempted to believe in the existence of imaginary creatures, according to an article published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology.

Divers have confirmed the identity of the wreck of a British submarine that was sunk by a German mine near Malta in 1942, putting an end to controversial claims that the sub was sunk by Italian warplanes during a secret mission off the coast of Libya.

University of Malta maritime archaeologist Timmy Gambin said a team of six researchers made two dives to the wreck at the end of April and established it was the HMS Urge by the name embossed on its conning tower.

Related: 30 of the world's most valuable treasures that are still missing 

Gambin led the team that discovered the wreck in 2019 about 6 miles (10 kilometers) east of Malta, in an area that had been mined by German ships during World War II.

Before it went missing in April 1942, the submarine, skippered by Lt. Cmdr. Edward Tomkinson, had distinguished itself with a string of successes in battle, including crippling the Italian battleship Vittorio Veneto and sinking the Italian cruiser Bande Nere, according to the Royal Navy.

Controversial claims

In 1942, the Urge was based at Malta, which was then a key British naval port in the Mediterranean Sea. At the end of April that year, the British Admiralty ordered the submarine to leave for Egypt, along with other warships, to escape the intense bombardment of the island by the German and Italian air forces.

But the Urge never arrived at Alexandria in Egypt and was officially reported missing at sea with 32 crew, 11 other naval personnel and a war correspondent on board.

The mystery of what happened to the Urge resurfaced in 2015 when a Belgian diver, Jean-Pierre Misson, claimed to have discovered its wreck off the coast of Libya, where he said it had been sunk by Italian warplanes during a secret mission, War History Online reported at the time.

Related: Mayday! 17 mysterious shipwrecks you can see on Google Earth

Misson's claims were contentious because they implied the Urge was off course when it sank, and that its commander may have disobeyed his orders. Misson continues to suggest that the wreck he found off Libya is that of the Urge, and that there has been a conspiracy to cover up its mission and fate.

But Gambin said the latest dives to the wreck off Malta confirmed it was the Urge, which was indicated by both the name embossed on the port side of its conning tower and a detailed three-dimensional digital scan of its hull, which matches the dimensions of the missing sub.

"It is now 100 percent confirmed," Gambin told Live Science. "We got some good images of the name that will hopefully do away with the absurd claim that she was lost off North Africa." 

Submarine wreck

This is the first time people have dived to the wreck of the Urge; an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) discovered the wreck in 2019, and subsequent efforts have been delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, Gambin said.

A team of six people, including Gambin, spent a total of more than 20 minutes at a depth of about 360 feet (110 meters), taking high-resolution photographs and video of the wreck, he said.

Their inspection revealed that the submarine had struck a naval mine placed by a German warship; the divers could see that the blast from the mine had punched a hole through the pressure hull of the submarine near the bow. 

The bow section must have rapidly filled with water and then broken off when the stricken sub plunged into the ocean floor, he said.

Photographs of the embossed name had been difficult to obtain, he said, because the best angle to highlight it was partially obscured by a legally protected gorgonian coral that had been growing there for decades.

"We abide by international standards where we don't touch the wreck, so I'm not going to go and just shove it out of the way," he said.

Details from the latest dives will now be forwarded to the United Kingdom's Royal Navy, which has responsibility for the wreck under international law.

Gambin said that finally determining the wreck was the Urge was personally important. "There is a massive difference between working on a Roman shipwreck, which is important archaeologically and very spectacular, and working with something from a recent conflict," he said.

"The daughter of the commander is still alive. … The love letters written by her mother are in the submarine," he said. "So for me, the science and the safety of the dives are paramount, but the most important thing is closure for the families."

Originally published on Live Science.

In January 1959, a group of nine young hikers — seven men and two women — trudged through Russia's snowy Ural Mountains toward a peak locally known as "Dead Mountain." The hikers pitched their tents at the base of a small slope, as an intensifying blizzard chilled the night air to minus 19 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 25 degrees Celsius). They never made it to their next waypoint.

It took nearly a month for investigators to find all nine bodies scattered amid the snow, trees and ravines of Dead Mountain. Some of the hikers died half-dressed, in just their socks and long underwear. Some had broken bones and cracked skulls; some were missing their eyes; and one young woman had lost her tongue, possibly to hungry wildlife. Their tent, half-buried in the snow and apparently slashed open from the inside, still held some of the hikers' neatly-folded clothes and half-eaten provisions.

All nine hikers had died of hypothermia after being cast into the cold "under the influence of a compelling natural force," a Russian investigation concluded at the time. But the specifics of the "compelling" force behind the now-infamous "Dyatlov Pass incident" (named for one of the hikers, Igor Dyatlov) have long remained a mystery, and given rise to one of the most enduring conspiracy theories in modern Russian history.

Related: 10 Times HBO's 'Chernobyl' got the science wrong

Everything from aliens to abominable snowmen have been implicated in the mystery since it rose to cultural prominence in the 1990s, following a retired official's account of the investigation (The Atlantic's Alec Luhn has summarized some of the most peculiar theories.) But now, a study published Thursday (Jan. 28) in the Nature journal Communications Earth & Environment provides the first scientific evidence behind a much more banal hypothesis: A small avalanche, triggered under unusual conditions, pummeled the hikers as they slept, then forced them to flee their tent into the cold, dark night.

"We do not claim to have solved the Dyatlov Pass mystery, as no one survived to tell the story," lead study author Johan Gaume, head of the Snow and Avalanche Simulation Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, told Live Science. "But we show the plausibility of the avalanche hypothesis [for the first time]." 

Mystery in the snow

The avalanche hypothesis is not new; two federal Russian investigations (completed in 2019 and 2020) also concluded that the hikers were most likely driven from their tents by a slab avalanche — that is, an avalanche that occurs when a slab of snow near the surface breaks away from a deeper layer of snow, and it slides downhill in blocky chunks. However, this hypothesis hasn't been widely accepted by the public, the new study noted, because neither investigation offered a scientific explanation for some of the incident's stranger details.

"The slab avalanche theory was criticized due to four main counterarguments," Gaume said.

Related: Cracked bones reveal cannibalism by doomed Arctic explorers

First and foremost, there was no sign of an avalanche when rescuers arrived at the campsite 26 days after the hikers went missing. Second, the slope where the hikers built their camp had an incline of less the 30 degrees, which is typically considered the minimum angle for an avalanche to occur, Gaume said. Third, there's evidence that the hikers fled their tents in the middle of the night, meaning the avalanche was triggered hours after the highest risk event, when the hikers built their camp — a process that involved cutting into the face of the slope to create a flat surface below their tent and a sheer wall of snow next to it (a common practice at the time, the study authors wrote). Finally, some of the hikers had sustained head and chest injuries that avalanches usually don't cause, Gaume said.

In their paper, Gaume and study co-author Alexander Puzrin, a researcher at the Institute for Geotechnical Engineering in Zurich, Switzerland, set out to address each of these critiques. They studied records from the time of the Dyatlov incident to recreate the environmental conditions that the hikers most likely faced on the night of their deaths, and then used a digital avalanche model to test whether a slab avalanche could have plausibly occurred under those conditions.

The team's analysis showed that the avalanche hypothesis stands up to every counterargument.

A 'brutal force of nature'

In their study, the researchers learned that the angle of the slope near the hiker's campsite was actually steeper than previous reports indicated; the slope angle measured 28 degrees, compared with the area's average slope angle of 23 degrees. Subsequent snowfalls in the weeks after the incident could have smoothed this angle, making the slope appear smaller while also covering signs of an avalanche, the team wrote. That detail took care of counter-argument number one.

As for the second, while 30 degrees is considered the standard slope angle at which slab avalanches can occur, this is not a hard rule, the researchers wrote; in fact, there's evidence of avalanches occurring on slopes with angles as little as 15 degrees. A key factor is the friction value between the upper slab layer (the one that falls) and the base layer (the one that stays in place). The base of the snowpack at the Dyatlov campsite was composed of depth hoar, or "sugar snow" — a type of grainy, crystallized ice that often increases the risk of avalanches, the team wrote. This grainy base layer could have easily helped facilitate a slab avalanche, even at a 28-degree incline.

As for the delay between the hikers cutting into the slope and the avalanche tumbling onto their tents? This could be explained by strong winds that gradually blew more and more snow onto the top of the slope near the team's campsite. Conditions on the mountain were extremely windy, and snow may have accumulated above the tent for as many as 9.5 to 13.5 hours before the upper slab finally gave way, the team's models showed.

Related: The 10 deadliest natural disasters in history

This leads to the final counterargument: the injuries. Some hikers were found with cracked ribs and skulls — injuries more in line with a car accident than an avalanche. However, the supposed slab avalanche at Dyatlov Pass was far from typical. Rather than standing in the direct path of the avalanche, the hikers would have been lying flat on their backs as they slept, with the snow rushing down on top of them over the small ledge they cut into the slope.

"Dynamic avalanche simulations suggest that even a relatively small slab [of snow] could have led to severe but non-lethal thorax and skull injuries, as reported by the post-mortem examination," the researchers wrote.

The team's models showed that, under specific environmental conditions, a slab avalanche could have plausibly toppled onto the Dyatlov group as they slept, long after they cut into the slope to build their camp. The crushing snow all but flattened the tent, cracking bones and forcing the hikers to hastily cut their way out of their snowy sarcophagus, dragging their wounded comrades behind as they attempted to survive the night in the open air. Sadly, none did.

While this paper doesn't explain every facet of the Dyatlov mystery, it does provide the first scientific proof that at least one popular hypothesis — the avalanche hypothesis — is plausible, the authors concluded. That explanation may be far less exciting than aliens or yetis, but for Gaume, the banality of the avalanche hypothesis reinforces something more important: the human aspect of the catastrophe.

"When [the hikers] decided to go to the forest, they took care of their injured friends — no one was left behind," Gaume said. "I think it is a great story of courage and friendship in the face of a brutal force of nature."

Originally published on Live Science.

Most conspiracy theories surrounding President John F. Kennedy’s assassination have been disproven. Kennedy was not killed by a gas-powered device triggered by aliens or by actor Woody Harrelson’s dad.

But speculation about Kennedy’s Nov. 22, 1963 murder in Dallas continues, fueled by unreleased classified documents, bizarre ballistics and the claim of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald – who was later killed on live TV while in police custody – that he was “just a patsy.”

Several JFK assassination experts, like the former New York Times investigative reporter Phillip Shenon, see Mexico as the best place to find answers regarding a possible conspiracy and who was behind it.

Just over a month before Kennedy’s killing, Oswald took a bus from Texas to Mexico City. He arrived Friday morning, Sept. 27, 1963 and left very early on Wednesday, Oct. 2, according to American and Mexican intelligence.

Was Oswald a kind of rogue James Bond who went south of the border to consort with communists, Cuban revolutionaries and spies – or just a deranged killer?

I dug into that question while researching my book on conspiracy narratives in Mexico, and I think I found something everybody else missed: a hole in the story of the very man who started a tenacious conspiracy theory about Oswald’s Mexico trip.

Communist Mexico City

Mexico was a Cold War hot spot in the mid-20th century, a haven for Soviet exiles, American leftists fleeing the anti-communist persecution of McCarthyism and sympathizers with Cuba’s Castro regime. Every communist and democratic country had an embassy in Mexico City – the only place in the Western Hemisphere where these enemies coexisted more or less openly.

According to witnesses from the Cuban and Soviet diplomatic missions, Oswald visited their embassies repeatedly on Friday and Saturday. He was desperately seeking visas to those countries, which Americans were then prohibited from visiting.

Told such documents would take months to process, Oswald got in a heated argument with the Cuban consul, Emilio Azcué. Oswald also forced a KGB volleyball match on Saturday morning to be canceled when he brandished a weapon at the Soviet consulate, before bursting into tears and leaving.

Those events are well documented by the CIA, which in the 1960s had ramped up its Mexico operations to monitor communist activity, even hiring 200 Mexican agents to help. The Mexican Secret Service, whose 1960s-era files Mexico has recently begun to declassify, also tracked Oswald on Sept. 27 and Sept. 28, 1963.

Oswald’s whereabouts for the next three-and-a-half days, however, remain unknown.

A conspiracy theory is born

A main conspiracy about Oswald’s undocumented time in Mexico City puts him in contact with dangerous Mexicans on the left side of the Cold War.

This story originated in March 1967, when the American consul in the Mexican coastal city of Tampico, Benjamin Ruyle, was buying drinks for local journalists.

One of them – Óscar Contreras Lartigue, a 28-year-old reporter for El Sol de Tampico – told Ruyle he’d met Oswald in 1963 when he was a law student at Mexico’s National Autonomous University.

Contreras said he’d been in a pro-Castro campus group and that Oswald had begged this group for help getting a Cuban visa. According to Contreras, Oswald spent two days with these National Autonomous University students, then met up with them again a few days later at the Cuban Embassy.

Evidently afraid for his life, Contreras wouldn’t tell Ruyle much more. He said he himself had traveled to Cuba, knew people in the Castro regime and had blown up the statue of a former Mexican president on campus in Mexico City. Contreras feared persecution for his political activities.

Contreras did say this wasn’t the first time he was sharing his story, though. After JFK was shot, Contreras told Ruyle, he’d commented to his editor that he’d recently met Oswald.

The Contreras question

Contreras’ account hinted at suspicious, previously unknown connections between Oswald and communist Cuba made shortly before JFK’s assassination.

His story was, according to a memo later sent from CIA headquarters, “the first solid investigative lead we have on Oswald’s activities in Mexico.” U.S. government officials needed to find out if Contreras was a trustworthy source.

Three months after Ruyle’s happy hour, a CIA official from Mexico City went to Tampico to question Contreras. During the six-hour interrogation, Contreras still refused to go into details, but he did say Oswald never mentioned assassination – only that he said repeatedly he “had to get to Cuba.”

In 1978, a researcher from the U.S. House Select Commission on Assassinations named Dan Hardway went to Mexico to investigate the JFK assassination. He was unable to interview Contreras despite several attempts, but in an influential report warned his account should not be dismissed.

The New York Times reporter Shenon, who interviewed Oscar Contreras for a 2013 book on the JFK assassination, also found Contreras credible. Shenon wrote that Contreras – whom he calls a “prominent journalist” – “went much further” in their interview than he had with the CIA, alleging “far more extensive contacts between Oswald and Cuban agents in Mexico.”

Dan Hardway, who is now a lawyer in West Virginia, still believes Contreras. After reading Shenon’s book, he reiterated in 2015 that Lee Harvey Oswald might have been part of a wider Cuban intelligence web.

Hole in the web

Óscar Contreras died in 2016, so I could not interview him myself.

But in my investigation, a minute detail of his biography grabbed my attention – an apparently overlooked contradiction that could undermine his entire story.

In Contreras’ telling, he fled the National Autonomous University campus and moved to Tampico around 1964. Yet Contreras also allegedly told his “editor” about his encounter with Oswald after the 1963 Kennedy assassination.

College newspapers aren’t common in Mexico, and Contreras was a law student. So how could he have had an editor in 1963?

I thought his hometown paper, El Sol de Tampico, might hold the answer. Digging through its archives, I found that the newspaper ran a Sunday gossip column in the early 1960s called “Crisol,” or “melting pot.”

Óscar Contreras became the reporter for “Crisol” on June 6, 1963, and continued writing the gossip column in September and October that year.

While Lee Harvey Oswald was in Mexico City, Contreras was 300 miles away in Tampico. In flamboyant prose, faded back issues of the local paper show, he chronicled the sumptuous wedding receptions, quinceañeras and yacht excursions of Tampico’s high society.

Three dark days

I believe the Sol de Tampico archives discredit Contereras’ account.

A political correspondent may live far from where his newspaper is published. But for a gossip columnist, that would be dereliction of duty.

This revelation plunges Oswald’s fall 1963 trip to Mexico back into the dark.

There are other conspiracy theories, including that Oswald had a Mexican mistress who took him to a party of communists and spies.

But it’s more likely Mexico holds no hidden clues to JFK’s assassination.

Conspiracy theories offer assurances of depth and closure, a promise that the biggest enigma of the 20th century is solvable. But from what we know about what Oswald did and didn’t do in Mexico City, he was a volatile, disorganized loner who couldn’t even handle travel logistics.

JFK’s assassination is a cold case. And in Mexico, only exhausted leads remain.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

Bill Nye has had it with flat-earthers and other science deniers. 

While humanity is landing robots on Mars and breaking open the mysteries of the universe, there continues a social trend of "science denialism." From opposition to handwashing in the 1800s to modern climate deniers, anti-maskers and "flat-Earthers," or people who believe that planet Earth is actually flat ( it is not), "anti-science" movements aren't new, but they are a problem facing us all today, according to Nye..

"The flat-Earthers, the anti-vaxxers, the anti-maskers are not on board with the progress of science. And the thing is, it affects all of us," Nye told Space.com. "When you deny the body of knowledge that's been discovered through the process of science, you're holding all of us back, and this is why it's such an important time."

He added to this reporter: "Chelsea, are you gonna vote? Please vote. My goodness." (Reader — and Bill Nye —  fear not, I am voting.)

Related: Bill Nye Tackles Time Travel (and Pot) in 2nd Netflix Season

"There are people running around in the United States, or in the world, on the electric internet, thinking out loud ... that the Earth might be flat," Nye told Space.com. "What?! It's the 21st century … just that anybody would even joke about it is weird. And so this anti-science movement that we have in the United States, well, in the Western world right now, is bad for everybody."

"That's why I did, or we did, the show the Science Guy show years ago was out of concern for the future of the United States especially," Nye said. 

Nye referenced the importance of a number of science advances including relativity. "Your mobile phone depends on Einstein's theories of both special and general relativity to get the right answer, to get it to work. And so we take all that for granted," he said.

He added that we all also depend on the science behind genetically modified food, which stems back thousands of years and is as advanced as ever today. "I just like to remind everybody ... farming is not natural. If you stop farming, it goes back, the land goes back to something else … so this is all science."

Nye added that "it's the exploration of space that led to these profound, profound improvements for quality of life for so many of us."

"I'm excited about the future. I mean, when the young people are running the show ... things are gonna improve or change for the better very rapidly," Nye added. "But it's, you know, as we always say, it's going to be a close call ... if we go get the climate so far out of control." 

You can see Bill Nye discuss science and more online at tin a replay of this year's virtual New York Comic-Con. Nye talked about his book "Bill Nye's Great Big World of Science," with coauthor and science journalist Gregory Mone.

Email Chelsea Gohd at cgohd@space.com or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

An antique, brass-trimmed wooden box holds all the tools that you might require in order to slay a vampire, including a 19th-century bible, crucifixes and a pistol. 

This "vampire-slaying kit" is estimated to be worth about $2,500 to $3,700 (£2,000 to £3,000) according to Hansons Auctioneers in Derbyshire, England, which is taking bids on the box beginning July 21.

Lined with crimson silk, the inside of the lid is decorated with an oval enamel painting showing Christ's resurrection. Next to that painting is an ivory carving of a wolf wearing a hooded robe and carrying rosary beads (though it is uncertain if the contents of the box are also suitable for dispatching werewolves, as the auction listing only mentions vampires).

Related: 7 strange ways humans act like vampires

Inside the box are eight compartments holding: a copy of the New Testament published in 1842; a knife with a silver blade; a percussion cap pocket pistol; pliers, crucifixes and rosary beads; a vial with a metal lid — "contents unknown;" and a small bottle containing sharks' teeth, according to the listing.

Vampire folklore and the belief in vampires can be traced to the ancient world. Indeed, burials dating to more than 1,000 years ago in Europe took safeguards to protect the living against the restless undead, with suspected vampires buried with stones in their mouths or pinned in place with rocks or iron bars. 

For people who believed in creatures that rose from the grave to drink blood, "the task of killing a vampire was extremely serious and historical accounts suggested the need for particular methods and tools," Charles Hanson, owner of Hansons Auctioneers, said in a statement.

However, alleged "vampires" were usually identified as such because people did not understand how infectious diseases spread, or because they misinterpreted a corpse's appearance during natural decomposition, Live Science previously reported.

As for the age and origins of this vampire-slaying kit — not to mention any indication that it was ever used to hunt and kill vampires — its current owner purchased it three years ago at an antiques fair in Newark-on-Trent in Nottinghamshire, England, and knows "very little of its history," the owner told the auction house.

"I loved the look of the Gothic box and, when I opened it, I just had to have it," said the owner, who lives in West Midlands in the U.K. and declined to be named. "I thought it was so interesting — a great conversation piece." 

The kit is part of an online auction of antiques and collectibles offered by Hansons Auctioneers, beginning on July 16. Other items include: 19th-century silver tableware, trays and cups; compacts and snuff boxes; and jewelry such as brooches, lockets and rings — though only the vampire box is described as an object of "supernatural interest," according to the auction website.

Originally published on Live Science.

In this episode of Life's Little Mysteries, we'll take a closer look at the science of excavating, preserving and interpreting clues from humanity's past: archaeology.

What caused the Mayan civilization to collapse, how did the ancient Egyptians build colossal pyramids, and what's the story behind a 2,000-year-old "computer" called the Antikythera Mechanism? Listen to Life's Little Mysteries 40: Mysterious Archaeology, to find out! 

You'll also hear about how underwater archaeology is helping historians put together missing pieces of a grim chapter in human history — the trans-Atlantic slave trade era. A partnership called the Slave Wrecks Project brings together archaeologists, historians, educators and diving professionals to find and study slave ships that were lost at sea — more than 1,000 ships are known to have sunk between 1525 and 1867.   

Co-hosts: Jeanna Bryner and Mindy Weisberger

Guests: Jay Haigler, lead instructor and the safety dive officer for Diving With a Purpose, and dive training coordinator for the Slave Wrecks Project

Steve Lubkemann, maritime archaeologist; co-founder of the Southern African Slave Wrecks and Diaspora Heritage Research Project, renamed the Slave Wrecks Project in 2014; International Coordinator for the Slave Wrecks Project

Listen to Life's Little Mysteries 40: Mysterious Archaeology below or on Audioboom, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, so you don’t miss out on new episodes.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for even more Life's Little Mysteries, and catch up on the latest Life's Little Mysteries articles. You can also join the conversation in our forums, where you can pose Life's Little Mysteries questions of your own, or even suggest topics for upcoming podcast episodes. 

Originally published on Live Science.

In this episode of Life's Little Mysteries, we'll take a closer look at mythical creatures and fantastic beasts that have inspired the human imagination for thousands of years.

Where did the idea of monsters like dragons and unicorns come from, and what's behind sailors' descriptions of beautiful and enticing mermaids? Listen to Life's Little Mysteries 37: Mysterious Mythical Creatures, to find out! 

You'll also hear about some of the creatures that persist in modern folklore, such as the Jersey Devil, the Mongolian Death Worm and the chupacabra. And while today's Bigfoot is a creature of legend rather than fact, a giant ape called Gigantopithecus actually did walk the Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Co-hosts: Jeanna Bryner and Mindy Weisberger

Guest: Tia Ghose, assistant managing editor at Live Science

Listen to Life's Little Mysteries 37: Mysterious Mythical Creatures below or on Audioboom, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, so you don’t miss out on new episodes.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for even more Life's Little Mysteries, and catch up on the latest Life's Little Mysteries articles. You can also join the conversation in our forums, where you can pose Life's Little Mysteries questions of your own, or even suggest topics for upcoming podcast episodes. 

Originally published on Live Science.

In this episode of Life's Little Mysteries, we'll explore an idea that originated thousands of years ago, and despite plenty of scientific evidence to the contrary, it mysteriously persists today — the notion that the world is flat.

What proof do we have that tells us the Earth is round? How do flat-earthers explain lunar eclipses and equinoxes, and why we don't fall off the planet? What would happen if the Earth really was flat? Listen to Life's Little Mysteries 9: Mysterious Flat-Earthers, to find out! 

We'll also hear about the late "Mad" Mike Hughes and his attempts to self-launch a rocket to see Earth's curve, and a psychology professor explains the factors that shape persistent belief in a flat Earth (and in other conspiracy theories).

Co-hosts: Jeanna Bryner and Mindy Weisberger

Guests: Jan-Willem van Prooijen, Associate Professor in Social and Organizational Psychology at Vrije University, Amsterdam; Brandon Specktor, senior writer at Live Science

Listen to Life's Little Mysteries 9: Mysterious Flat-Earthers below, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, so you don’t miss out on new episodes.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for even more Life's Little Mysteries, and catch up on the latest Life's Little Mysteries articles. You can also join the conversation in our forums, where you can pose Life's Little Mysteries questions of your own, or even suggest topics for upcoming podcast episodes. 

Originally published on Live Science.

Mike Huges, the self-taught rocket scientist and self-avowed  flat-Earth conspiracy theorist, died Saturday morning (Feb. 22) during an attempt to launch a homemade rocket outside Barstow in San Bernardino County, California, according to news reports.

"Mad Mike," as he called himself, was attempting to reach an altitude of 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) Saturday. He rode his rocket into the sky, but something went wrong and as he rocketed into the air on top of a column of steam, a green parachute seemed to rip off from the rocket, as seen in a video posted to Twitter by freelance journalist Justin Chapman; Hughes then fell to his death, said Darren Shuster, his public relations representative, as reported by the LA Times.

This wasn’t Hughes’ first rodeo, as the self-taught engineer had made two other attempts, the latest of which was supposed to launch in August 2019. That attempt was grounded by bad weather. Before that, the rocketeer had a successful (albeit bumpy) launch in March 2018, when his homemade rocket reached 1,875 feet (572 m) in altitude over Amboy, California. During that launch, Hughes had to deploy two parachutes to save himself from smashing into the desert. Even so he plummeted back to Earth at 350 mph (563 km/h). He got out of that one with just a sore back, he said at the time. 

Would flat-Earth-believer Hughes have been able to see our planet's sphere at 5,000 feet (1,524 m)? Nope. And he knew that, saying he would need to soar past the so-called Kármán line — where the sky ends and space begins, or roughly 62 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth — to see the curvature with his own eyes.

To do that, Hughes  told the Associated Press in 2018 that he wanted to build a "Rockoon," or rocket/gas-balloon-hybrid. That, he said, would let him float high into the atmosphere before lighting the rocket's fuse to boost him even farther into the air. 

The current attempt, which Hughes had partnered up with Waldo Stakes to carry out, was being documented in a Science Channel series called "Homemade Astronauts." 

"Michael 'Mad Mike' Hughes tragically passed away today during an attempt to launch his homemade rocket. Our thoughts & prayers go out to his family & friends during this difficult time. It was always his dream to do this launch & Science Channel was there to chronicle his journey," the Science Channel tweeted.

• 7 Ways to Prove Earth Is Round (Without Going to Space)
• 101 Images of a Round Earth Taken from Space
• 8 Times Flat-Earthers Tried to Challenge Science (And Failed)

Originally published on Live Science.  

A man crouches on the Oregon forest floor late at night, peering between the trees for signs of nocturnal life. The scene is pitch-black but his face and hands are visible in infrared footage, and he scans the landscape with a thermal camera, looking for a heat signature that would indicate he isn't alone.

Suddenly, a red blob emerges in the distance.

"Do you see that?" he whispers. "It's something big."

But could it be Bigfoot, North America's fabled apelike creature? That's the question this man — author and explorer Russell Acord — and his colleagues are trying to answer, in the new Travel Channel documentary series "Expedition Bigfoot," premiering tonight (Dec. 8) at 10 p.m. ET/PT. 

Related: Real or Not? The Science Behind 12 Unusual Sightings

More than 10,000 eyewitness accounts have described Bigfoot encounters in the continental U.S. over the past 50 years. Bigfoot even has an FBI file that was released to the public on June 5; in 1977, the agency examined 15 unidentified fibers that were suspected of being Bigfoot hairs. But the hairs were eventually found to be "of deer family origin," FBI Assistant Director Jay Cochran, Jr. wrote in a letter. 

Now, Travel Channel searchers are hot on the trail of the bipedal beast, bringing the hunt to the Pacific Northwest, where about one-third of all "Bigfoot" encounters have taken place. 

In the series, a team of experts — including a primatologist — embarked on a three-week search for the elusive Bigfoot. Using state-of-the-art equipment and computer algorithms, the team analyzed footprints and possible nest sites, and recorded mysterious vocalizations at Bigfoot "hotspots" around 90,000 acres of land in central Oregon, Travel Channel representatives said in a statement. 

Hairy and apelike

Purported Bigfoot sightings often describe a tall, hairy creature resembling a gigantic ape that walks on two legs. An enormous primate known as Gigantopithecus — standing 10 feet (3 meters) tall and weighing up to 595 lbs. (270 kilograms) — once lived in Southeast Asia, but it went extinct hundreds of thousands of years ago. And large, hairy animals such as woolly mammoths and rhinos roamed North America during the Ice Age. But to date, there is no fossil evidence showing that large primates other than humans ever inhabited North America, said primate researcher and "Expedition Bigfoot" team member Mireya Mayor, director of the Exploration and Science Communications Initiative in the College of Arts, Sciences and Education at Florida International University. 

However, the idea that a new type of undiscovered primate could be hiding in dense woodlands in North America "is totally within the realm of possibility" as long as the animals have food, shelter and a habitat that isolates them from humans, Mayor told Live Science. In fact, chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall said in a 2002 interview that she wouldn't dismiss the possibility that such creatures might be real.

"I'm a romantic, so I always wanted them to exist," she told NPR host Ira Flatow.

Big and small

In 2001, Mayor co-discovered a new species of tiny mouse lemur that is one of the world's smallest primates, weighing less than 2 ounces (57 grams). Small animals can be hard to spot in the wild, but even a very big primate such as the reported Bigfoot could conceal itself from humans quite effectively, Mayor added.

"We've seen that throughout history with other apes," she explained. "When I went in search of western lowland gorillas, because of the dense vegetation that they live in [and] the fact that they're not habituated and in fact avoid humans at all costs, there were times where we were no more than 3 feet [1 meter] away from a 450-lb. [204 kilograms] silverback, and didn't know that it was there for a good hour or two."

Related: In Photos: A Game-Changing Primate Discovery

As Mayor reviewed eyewitness accounts of possible Bigfoot sightings, one thing that stood out was the consistency of the descriptions: a large, bipedal creature with primate-like behavior. "And when we were in the field, we were able to capture something on video that fits this description: very big and moving in an apelike — if not bipedal — fashion," Mayor said. "That, to me, is probably the most compelling piece of evidence that I've seen so far." 

Mayor shared this footage with a fellow primatologist who has studied living primates around the world and is familiar with all known forms of primate locomotion. 

"When he saw the footage, he was completely blown away and agreed with me that something apelike was far from its home," Mayor said.

The burden of proof

Compelling though this new evidence may be, only a recovered body or genetic data from organic tissue, feces or hairs could definitively establish this fabled creature as a newfound species. Scientifically describing any new species means establishing a holotype — a single physical specimen representing the species, according to paleontologist David Hone, a senior lecturer in zoology with the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences at Queen Mary University of London.

Describing the new species also requires a detailed outline of behavioral, anatomical, and genetic features that establish the animal's uniqueness and set it apart from its close relatives, he wrote for the Guardian.

To date, physical evidence supposedly representing Bigfoot has consisted primarily of hairs, and all of those samples that underwent genetic analysis have belonged to existing animals. In 2014, researchers examined 36 "Bigfoot" hair samples collected around the world, linking most of the hairs to raccoons, horses, deer, cows, coyotes, a Malaysian tapir and even humans. 

Intriguingly, two samples did not belong to any known species. However, the DNA data showed that the mystery hairs didn't come from primates, and they likely belonged to unknown bear species, the scientists reported in their study, published in March 2014 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

• Rumor or Reality: The Creatures of Cryptozoology
• Top 10 Unexplained Phenomena 
• Busted! The World's 6 Greatest Hoaxes
• The most famous Bigfoot sightings

Originally published on Live Science.

The Earth is a sphere. This is a simple fact that humans have known for thousands of years; it was incontrovertibly confirmed as soon as the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik 1 satellite in 1957 and it went … you know ... around the globe. 

Nevertheless, a small but vocal group of people who insist that the world is flat — so-called flat-earthers — have emerged online in recent years, and they seem to be sowing doubt about this most basic aspect of reality. Many flat-earthers put a great deal of effort into concocting alternative explanations for why the world behaves as if it's round when it's actually flat — even though a spherical Earth clearly fits the observations humans have made about the planet over the last few millennia.  

However, if Earth, somehow, were truly flat, it would not behave much like the planet we know today. In fact, humanity (and everything else) would be very, very dead. 

Related: Are Flat-Earthers Being Serious?

To shape a cosmic body into a disk (rather than a sphere), you've got to spin it very fast, says David Stevenson, a planetary scientist at Caltech in Pasadena, California. This would, unfortunately, destroy the planet by tearing it into tiny particles. In the 1850s, astronomer James Clerk Maxwell showed mathematically that a solid, disk-like shape isn't a stable configuration in the cosmos, in work he conducted regarding Saturn's rings. Maxwell's research predicted that Saturn's rings would be made of lots of small, unconnected particles; he turned out to be right. His math also explains why there are no planet-size disks floating around the galaxy.

To flatten Earth without spinning it very rapidly, you'd need magic, or perhaps a galactic panini press. At any rate, a stamped-flat Earth wouldn't last for long. Within a few hours, the force of gravity would press the planet back into a spheroid. Gravity pulls equally from all sides, which explains why planets are spheres (or nearly so – depending on the speed of a planet's rotation, those forces may work against gravity to create a bit of a bulge at the equator). A stable, solid disk-like Earth just isn’t possible under the actual conditions of gravity, as Maxwell’s math showed. 

And once you get rid of gravity, everything about our planet rapidly stops making sense. 

The atmosphere? Gone, because it's held to the planet by gravity. Tides? Gone. They're caused by the gravitational pull of the moon, which tugs on the oceans and causes them to subtly bulge out as it swings by. 

The moon itself? Also gone, since every explanation of the moon's existence involves gravity. In the most widely accepted scenario, the moon was created when a giant, planet-size body crashed into the early Earth; debris from the crash was captured by Earth's gravity. Another scenario suggests that the moon formed at the same time as Earth did (again, thanks to gravity). Or, Earth's formidable gravity attracted and snagged the traveling hunk of space rock as it went hurtling by. 

Simple calculations

Gravity is also responsible for Earth's layered structure, with the densest materials sinking to the core, lighter materials making up the mantle and the lightest materials forming the crust. Without this layered structure, the planet would behave a lot differently. Earth's liquid outer core, for example, acts as a giant, dynamic magnet, which creates the planet's magnetic field. The magnetic field helps protect the planet's atmosphere from the stripping effect of the solar wind, which scraped away Mars' atmosphere after that planet's magnetic field faltered 4 billion years ago. 

If the Earth were flat, plate tectonics — the movement of rigid plates that make up the planet's crust — wouldn't work either, says James Davis, a geophysicist at the Columbia University Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York City. 

"When you do the calculations, just simple calculations like, 'If this plate is moving this much and that plate is moving that much,' you have to do it on a sphere," he told Live Science. "You don't get the right answer [the answer that matches real-world observations] if you assume it's a plane." 

Related: 8 Times Flat-Earthers Tried to Challenge Science (and Failed)

Flat-earthers spin different explanations for how all these observations could be possible on a flat planet. The problem, Davis says, is that these explanations don't have any basis in mathematics or physical reality. When Maxwell predicted in the 1850s that Saturn's rings were made of lots of small particles, he did so by applying general knowledge of how gravity and rotational forces work. His essay on the subject, in fact, was mostly mathematical equations. Flat-Earth theories don't work that way, Davis says. 

The flat-Earth worldview also involves cherry-picking different explanations for different phenomena. In real life, the Earth and the Moon are both round for the same quantifiable reason — gravity. Flat Earth believers have to invent independent explanations for both, and these independent explanations often contradict one another. This isn’t how scientific theory works, Davis says. 

"If we can explain a thousand observations with one theory, a simple theory, that's better than explaining a thousand observations with a thousand theories," he said. 

But setting all that aside, if the Earth were truly flat, it would mean that the millions of scientists who deny its flatness — and who have done so throughout history — are united in a vast conspiracy for reasons that are flat-out unfathomable. It almost makes the prospect of a galactic panini press look realistic. 

Almost.

• How Do Flat-Earthers Explain the Equinox? We Investigated.
• How Flat-Earthers Explain Total Lunar Eclipses
• Flat-Earthers Explain Why We Don't Fall Off the Edge of Our Planet, and It Involves Pac-Man

Originally published on Live Science.

In 1855, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported on the gruesome murder of a bride by her new husband. The story came from the French countryside, where the woman's parents had initially prevented the couple's engagement "on account of the strangeness of conduct sometimes observed in the young man," although he "otherwise was a most eli[g]ible match."

The parents eventually consented, and the marriage took place. Shortly after the newlyweds withdrew to consummate their bond, "fearful shrieks" came from their quarters. People quickly arrived to find "the poor girl… in the agonies of death — her bosom torn open and lacerated in a most horrible manner, and the wretched husband in a fit of raving madness and covered with blood, having actually devoured a portion of the unfortunate girl's breast."

The bride died a short time later. Her husband, after "a most violent resistance," also expired.

What could have caused this horrifying incident? "It was then recollected, in answer to searching questions by a physician," that the groom had previously "been bitten by a strange dog." The passage of madness from dog to human seemed like the only possible reason for the grisly turn of events.

Related: Werewolves: Lore, Legend & Lycanthropy

The Eagle described the episode matter-of-factly as "a sad and distressing case of hydrophobia," or, in today's parlance, rabies.

But the account read like a Gothic horror story. It was essentially a werewolf narrative: The mad dog's bite caused a hideous metamorphosis, which transformed its human victim into a nefarious monster whose vicious sexual impulses led to obscene and loathsome violence.

My new book, "Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers: Rabies, Medicine, and Society in an American Metropolis, 1840-1920," explores the hidden meanings behind the ways people talked about rabies. Variants of the rabid groom story had been told and retold in English language newspapers in North America since at least the beginning of the 18th century, and they continued to appear as late as the 1890s.

The Eagle's account was, in essence, a folk tale about mad dogs and the thin dividing line between human and animal. Rabies created fear because it was a disease that seemed able to turn people into raging beasts.

A terrifying and fatal disease

The historian Eugen Weber once observed that French peasants in the 19th century feared "above all wolves, mad dogs, and fire." Canine madness — or the disease that we know today as rabies — conjured up the canine terrors that have formed the stuff of nightmares for centuries.

Other infectious diseases — including cholera, typhoid and diphtheria — killed far more people in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The cry of "Mad dog!" nonetheless sparked an immediate sense of terror, because a simple dog bite could mean a protracted ordeal of grueling symptoms, followed by certain death.

Modern medicine knows that rabies is caused by a virus. Once it enters the body, it travels to the brain via the nervous system. The typical lag time of weeks or months between initial exposure and onset of symptoms means that rabies is no longer a death sentence if a patient quickly receives injections of immune antibodies and vaccine, in order to build immunity soon after encountering a suspect animal. Though it's rare for people to die of rabies in the U.S., the disease still kills tens of thousands of people globally every year.

According to 19th-century sources, after an incubation period of between four and 12 weeks, symptoms might start with a vague sense of agitation or restlessness. They then progressed to the wracking spasmodic episodes characteristic of rabies, along with sleeplessness, excitability, feverishness, rapid pulse, drooling and labored breathing. Victims not infrequently exhibited hallucinations or other mental disruptions as well.

Efforts to mitigate violent outbursts with drugs often failed, and physicians could then do little more than stand by and bear witness. Final release came only after the disease ran its inevitably fatal course, usually over a period of two to four days. Even today, rabies remains essentially incurable once clinical signs appear.

Centuries ago, the loss of bodily control and rationality triggered by rabies seemed like an assault on victims' basic humanity. From a real dreaded disease transmitted by animals emerged spine-tingling visions of supernatural forces that transferred malevolent animals' powers and turned people into monsters.

Bites that transform people into animals

Nineteenth-century American accounts never invoked the supernatural directly. But descriptions of symptoms indicated unspoken assumptions about how the disease transmitted the biting animal's essence to the suffering human.

Newspapers frequently described those who contracted rabies from dog bites as barking and snarling like dogs, while cat-bite victims scratched and spat. Hallucinations, respiratory spasms and out-of-control convulsions produced fearful impressions of the rabid animal's evil imprint.

Traditional preventive measures also showed how Americans quietly assumed a blurred boundary between humanity and animality. Folk remedies held that dog-bite victims could protect themselves from rabies by killing the dog that had already bitten them, or applying the offending dog's hair to the wound, or cutting off its tail.

Such preventatives implied a need to cut an invisible, supernatural tie between a dangerous animal and its human prey.

Sometimes the disease left eerie traces. When a Brooklynite died from rabies in 1886, the New York Herald recorded a freakish occurence: Within minutes after the man's last breath, "the bluish ring on his hand — the mark of the Newfoundland's fatal bite…disappeared." Only death broke the mad dog's pernicious hold.

Vampires' roots in rabid dogs

It's possible that, along with werewolves, vampire stories also originated from rabies.

Physician Juan Gómez-Alonso has pointed out a resonance between vampirism and rabies in the hair-raising symptoms of the disease — the distorted sounds, exaggerated facial appearances, restlessness and sometimes wild and aggressive behaviors that made sufferers seem more monstrous than human.

Extreme oversensitivity to stimuli, which set off the tortuous spasmodic episodes associated with rabies, could have a particularly strange effect. A glance at a mirror might set off a violent response, in a chilling parallel with the living-dead vampire's inability to cast a reflection.

Moreover, in different eastern European folkloric traditions, vampires turned themselves not into bats, but into wolves or dogs, the key vectors of rabies.

So as aspiring werewolves, vampires and other haunts take to the streets for Halloween, remember that beneath the annual ritual of candy and costumed fun lie the darker recesses of the imagination. Here animals, disease and fear intermingle, and monsters materialize at the crossover point between animality and humanity.

Cave canem — beware the dog.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

• Vampires, Zombies & Werewolves, Oh My! The Origins of Halloween Monsters
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"Witch hunt" — it's a refrain used to deride everything from impeachment inquiries and sexual assault investigations to allegations of corruption.

When powerful men cry witch, they're generally not talking about green-faced women wearing pointy hats. They are, presumably, referring to the Salem witch trials, when 19 people in 17th-century Massachusetts were executed on charges of witchcraft.

Using "witch hunt" to decry purportedly baseless allegations, however, reflects a misunderstanding of American history. Witch trials didn't target the powerful. They persecuted society's most marginal members — particularly women.

Related: Black Magic: History's 6 Most Infamous Witch Trials

Too rich, too poor, too female

In my scholarship on the darker aspects of U.S. culture, I've researched and written about numerous witch trials. I teach a college course here in Massachusetts that explores this perennially popular but frequently misinterpreted period in New England history.

Perhaps the most salient point about witch trials, students quickly come to see, is gender. In Salem, 14 of the 19 people found guilty of, and executed for, witchcraft during that cataclysmic year of 1692 were women.

Across New England, where witch trials occurred somewhat regularly from 1638 until 1725, women vastly outnumbered men in the ranks of the accused and executed. According to author Carol F. Karlsen's "The Devil in the Shape of a Woman," 78% of 344 alleged witches in New England were female.

And even when men faced allegations of witchcraft, it was typically because they were somehow associated with accused women. As historian John Demos has established, the few Puritan men tried for witchcraft were mostly the husbands or brothers of alleged female witches.

Women held a precarious, mostly powerless position within the deeply religious Puritan community.

The Puritans thought women should have babies, raise children, manage household life and model Christian subservience to their husbands. Recalling Eve and her sinful apple, Puritans also believed that women were more likely to be tempted by the Devil.

Powerless people

As magistrates, judges and clergy, men enforced the rules of this early American society.

When women stepped outside their prescribed roles, they became targets. Too much wealth might reflect sinful gains. Too little money demonstrated bad character. Too many children could indicate a deal with a devil. Having too few children was suspicious, too.

Mary Webster of Hadley, Massachusetts, was married without children and relied on neighborly charity to survive. Apparently, Webster was not meek and grateful enough for the alms she received: She developed a reputation for being unpleasant.

Webster's neighbors accused her of witchcraft in 1683, when she was around 60 years old, claiming she worked with the devil to bewitch local livestock. Boston's Court of Assistants, which presided over cases of witchcraft, declared her not guilty.

Then, a few months after the verdict, one of Webster's upstanding neighbors, Philip Smith, fell ill. Distraught residents blamed Webster and attempted to hang her, supposedly to relieve Smith's torments.

Smith died anyway. Webster, however, survived the attempted execution — much to the terror of her neighbors, I imagine.

The accused witch Mary Bliss Parsons, of Northampton, Massachusetts, was the opposite of Webster. She was the wife of the wealthiest man in town and the mother of nine healthy children.

But neighbors found Parsons to be a "woman of forcible speech and domineering ways," historian James Russell Trumbull wrote in his 1898 history of Northampton. In 1674 she was charged with witchcraft.

Parsons, too, was acquitted. Eventually, continuing witchcraft rumors forced the Parsons family to resettle in Boston.

Stay in line, woman

Prior to Salem, most witchcraft trials in New England resulted in acquittal. According to Demos, of the 93 documented witch trials that happened before Salem, 16 "witches" were executed.

But the accused rarely went unpunished.

In his 2005 book "Escaping Salem," Richard Godbeer examines the case of two Connecticut women — Elizabeth Clawson of Stamford and Mercy Disborough of Fairfield — accused of bewitching a servant girl named Kate Branch.

Both women were "confident and determined, ready to express their opinions and to stand their ground when crossed." Clawson was found not guilty after spending five months in jail. Disborough remained imprisoned for almost a year until she was acquitted.

Both had to pay the fines and fees related to their imprisonment.

Woman v woman

Most Puritans who claimed to be victims of witchcraft were also female.

In the famed Salem witch trials, the people "afflicted" by an unexplained "distemper" in 1692 were all teenaged girls.

Initially, two girls from the Reverend Samuel Parris' household claimed they were being bitten, pinched and pricked by invisible specters. Soon other girls reported similar feelings. Some threw fits, crying out that they saw terrifying specters.

Some have suggested that the girls were faking their symptoms. In a 1700 book, Boston merchant and historian Robert Calef called them "vile varlets."

Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible" also casts one of the Salem girls as the villain. His play depicts Abigail — who was, in real life, a girl of 11 — as a manipulative 16-year-old carrying on an affair with a married man. To get his wife out of the way, Abigail makes witchcraft accusations.

Nothing in the historical record suggests an affair. But Miller's play is so widely staged that countless Americans know only this version of events.

Systematic oppression

Other Salem stories blame Tituba, an enslaved woman in the household of the Reverend Samuel Parris, for teaching witchcraft to the local girls. Tituba confessed to "signing the devil's book" in 1692, confirming Puritans' worst fears that the devil was actively recruiting.

But given her position as an enslaved person and a woman of color, it's almost certain that Tituba's confession was coerced.

This is why witch trials weren't just about accusations that today seem baseless. They were also about a justice system that escalated local grievances to capital offenses and targeted a subjugated minority.

Women were both the victims and the accused in this terrible American history, casualties of a society created and controlled by powerful men.

[ You're smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation's authors and editors. You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter. ]

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

An elderly Scottish woman who was accused of witchcraft in the 1700s did not rest in peace — her bones were removed from the grave during the 19th century for study by local scholars, and later vanished from the records. Her skull, once exhibited in Scotland's Museum of the University of St. Andrews and at the Empire Exhibition in Glasgow in 1938, also disappeared sometime during the 20th century.

But on Aug. 31, the 315th anniversary of the purported witch's death, Scottish officials held a memorial service for the woman and revived the search for her missing bones, the Washington Post reported.

The woman, named Lilias Adie, lived in Torryburn, Fife, in Scotland, and died in prison in 1704 after confessing — likely under torture — to casting malicious spells on her neighbors and having sex with the devil, according to the Post. 

Related: Black Magic: 6 Infamous Witch Trials in History

Fife authorities recently announced that they were seeking information about the whereabouts of Adie's skull and the rest of her skeleton; if found, the remains would be incorporated into a monument commemorating the thousands of Scottish men and women prosecuted and killed as witches, the Post reported.

Though Adie died more than 300 years ago, her face resurfaced in 2017, as a digital reconstruction created by Scotland's Centre of Anatomy and Human Identification at Dundee University (CAHID). Forensic artist and CAHID lecturer Christopher Rynn performed the reconstruction; it showed Adie with "quite a kind face," Rynn said in a statement that year. 

Because Adie's skull was nowhere to be found, Rynn crafted the digital model by working from photographs of the skull in the collection of the University of St. Andrews. As Adie was merely a frail, old woman — not the "terrifying monster" that her neighbors described — Rynn sculpted her face with a friendly expression, he explained in the statement.

Adie's grave lies on a Torryburn beach where it is exposed during low tide; the site was originally topped with a heavy stone, allegedly to keep Adie from rising from the dead to take revenge on her tormentors. It is the only known witch's burial site in Scotland, though approximately 3,500 Scottish people — most of them women — were tried and executed as witches during the early years of the 18th century, according to the Post. 

As such, the solitary grave — and Adie — hold special significance in commemorating this dark chapter in Scotland's past, Fife's Depute Provost Councillor Julie Ford said in a statement. 

"It's important to recognize that Lilias Adie and the thousands of other men and women accused of witchcraft in early modern Scotland were not the evil people history has portrayed them to be. They were the innocent victims of unenlightened times," Ford said.

"It's time we recognized the injustice served upon them," she added.

• Photos: Scottish Church Once Imprisoned Accused Witches
• What's Witchcraft? 6 Misconceptions about Wiccans
• A Bewitching History: Why Witches Ride Broomsticks

Flat-Earth proponent, former limo driver and amateur rocketeer "Mad" Mike Hughes planned to launch 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) into the air above the community of Amboy in California's Mojave Desert Monday (Aug. 12). But his homemade, steam-powered rocket never got off the ground, thanks to a faulty water heater that he bought off of Craigslist. 

The launch is currently postponed until possibly Saturday, Aug. 17. 

According to Hughes' publicist Darren Shuster, the faulty heater that Hughes bought for $325 off of Craigslist wasn't able to heat the water to 400 degrees Fahrenheit (200 degrees Celsius), the temperature required to create the steam to propel the rocket. Hughes paid $50 for the nose cone of the rocket, which he plans to launch off the back of a semi truck he was gifted. Shuster added that no one knows where the nose cone came from or what its original intent was, but Hughes modified it for its current purpose on the rocket. The launch is sponsored by hud, a casual dating app.

"I appreciate the support, love and excitement from everybody, and a delay will not stop my mission — the rocket is in place and needs a leak plugged up, so weekend is a go," Hughes told Space.com. 

Related: 8 Times That Flat-Earthers Tried to Challenge Science (and Failed)

Hughes, 63, previously launched in March 2018 to an altitude of 1,875 feet (572 m) aboard his steam-powered rocket, which he modified for this launch. Hughes walked away from last year's launch sore and with a compressed vertebra, so even if he is able to launch again and survive the landing, it remains to be seen how Hughes will fair after reaching new heights. 

In media coverage of his 2018 launch, a number of publications stated that Hughes was launching to see Earth's curvature for himself (it is not visible at the altitude that Hughes aims to reach this month). However, Hughes told Space.com that he was launching to this higher altitude because, simply, he is a daredevil. 

"I believe the Earth is flat," Hughes said. But "this flat Earth has nothing to do with the steam rocket launches," he added. "It never did. It never will. I'm a daredevil!"

Still, soon before he attempted to launch on Aug. 11, Hughes gave another motivation for his latest launch attempt — President Donald Trump. 

This "launch is about my personal desire to inspire my fellow Americans to help make this country great again," he said in a press statement, adding that he hopes his feat will garner an invitation to the White House for himself and his launch crew.

"Trump is the greatest president since there's been a president!" Hughes added in the same statement. "I intend to spread the word about MAGA with my homegrown, steam-powered, manned rocket. I am the homegrown Rocket Man."

While it is difficult to pinpoint Hughes' true intentions in risking his life by launching himself into the sky, this Trump-centric re-brand may be another attempt to generate more attention and (and therefore, more funding) for his next launch, which he hopes will take him all the way to the Karman line — a boundary 62 miles (100 km) above Earth's surface that represents the beginning of space.

• Flat-Earther to Launch Himself in Homemade Steam Rocket Saturday
• Flat-Earther Blasts Himself into the Sky on Homemade Rocket (and He Survives)
• Flat-Earthers' Cruise Will Sail to Antarctica 'Ice Wall' at the Planet's Edge. Right.

Follow Chelsea Gohd on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

"Mad" Mike Hughes, a self-taught rocketeer and flat-Earth conspiracy theorist, will once again attempt to launch himself into the sky over the Mojave Desert on a steam-powered rocket this Sunday (Aug. 11), hopefully reaching heights of 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) before parachuting safely back to the round, welcoming Earth. (What are you doing this weekend?)

The stunt, which is being sponsored by a "commitment-free dating app" and filmed as part of an upcoming Discovery Channel series featuring Hughes, gives the 63-year-old rocketeer a chance to outdo himself following a successful-yet-bumpy DIY launch he completed in March 2018. 

Despite multiple setbacks and dust-ups with the Bureau of Land Management, Hughes rode his homemade rocket some 1,875 feet (572 m) into the air over Amboy, California, on March 24, 2018, before plummeting back to Earth at 350 mph (563 km/h). Hughes had to deploy two parachutes to save himself from smashing into the desert nose-first, finally walking away with just a sore back.

This Sunday's launch looks to be a bit riskier, with Hughes aiming to blast himself more than twice as high into the sky before dropping back to Earth at around 400 mph (643 km/h), according to a news release for the event. As with last year's launch, Hughes reportedly made his new steam-powered rocket at home in his garage — however, he will get some help this time in the form of a portable launchpad, instead of having to jury-rig a mobile home into a ramp (as he did last year).

Will Hughes be able to see the curvature of the Earth from his mile-high vantage point, thus crushing his stated belief that our planet is "shaped like a Frisbee?" Not unless his steam-powered contraption exceeds its reach by about seven-fold, carrying him 35,000 feet (10,700 m) up instead.

But proving or disproving the Earth's 100% verifiable roundness is not the goal of this stunt, anyway. As Hughes has said before, he will need to soar past the Kármán line — that contested boundary where the sky ends and space begins, roughly 62 miles (100 kilometers) over Earth — to personally see our apparently latke-shaped planet from space with his own eyes. To do that, Hughes told the Associated Press last year, he wants to build a "Rockoon," or rocket/gas-balloon-hybrid, which he can use to float high into the atmosphere before lighting the rocket's fuse and blasting up even farther. This Sunday's event puts him one small step closer to that ambition.

Truly, 2019 is an exciting time to love rocket science while believing that everything NASA says is a lie.

• 7 Ways to Prove Earth Is Round (Without Going to Space)
• 101 Images of a Round Earth Taken from Space
• 8 Times Flat-Earthers Tried to Challenge Science (And Failed)

Originally published on Live Science.

A small building in England that was once a medieval prison for people accused of witchcraft is now a cozy home in need of an owner.

But prospective buyers should be forewarned: The sordid history of the former jail, known as "The Cage," has led many to claim that the house is haunted, with some calling it the most haunted house in England, British real estate agency Home Domus 360 wrote in a listing on Facebook.

"With a reputation attracting TV crews from around the world, this unique 2 bedroom cottage comes available with many resident ghosts," Home Domus 360 representatives said on Facebook. [Black Magic: 6 Infamous Witch Trials in History]

Located in St. Osyth in Essex, U.K., the building was recently placed on the market by owner Vanessa Mitchell; this is the third time that Mitchell has tried to sell The Cage since moving out in 2008, according to local news outlet The Clacton and Frinton Gazette. Mitchell reportedly fled the house in 2004 and moved elsewhere after seeing "mysterious blood spatters" and being "physically attacked" by malevolent ghosts — one of which was "a satanic-looking goat," Mitchell told The Gazette.

During the St. Osyth witch trials in 1582, 14 women were accused of witchcraft-related crimes, for which three were executed, the East Anglian Times reported. During the trials, the women were housed in The Cage. One of the accused, Ursula Kemp, was a local healer who was sentenced to death by hanging; she is commemorated in a plaque that hangs on one of the former prison's walls.

Kemp was accused of casting spells that led to the death of a neighbor's newborn. She then accused others of practicing witchcraft, and they, in turn, accused even more unfortunate individuals, according to the Times. Essex was a hotbed of witchcraft trials during the 16th and 17th centuries — of the 112 witches who were executed in England in the 1640s alone, 82 were put to death in Essex, the Times reported.

In 1921, two female skeletons that were thought to be the remains of executed witches — one of them reportedly Kemp — were unearthed in a St. Osyth garden during a construction project. Some of the bones appeared to have been pierced with nails, a common practice for dead witches to keep their spirits from haunting the living, according to the Times.

The asking price for the allegedly haunted former prison is 240,000 pounds ($305,478), according to Wales Online.

• Photos: Scottish Church Once Imprisoned Accused Witches
• What's Witchcraft? 6 Misconceptions About Wiccans
• Here's Where J.K. Rowling Got Her Magical Ideas for Harry Potter (Photos)

Originally published on Live Science.

The U.S. government released Bigfoot's FBI file yesterday (June 5). It contains a few news clippings, and some formal letters to and from a monster hunter in the 1970s — leading to an examination of 15 hairs and some skin the hunter believed came from "a Bigfoot."

It appears that Peter Byrne, that monster hunter, first wrote to the FBI on Aug. 26, 1976. His note, printed on fancy letterhead reading "The Bigfoot Information Center and Exhibition," suggested that the FBI was in possession of flesh and hair belonging to a mysterious creature, possibly belonging to a "Bigfoot."

"Gentlemen," Byrne wrote, "Will you kindly, to set the record straight, once and for all, inform us if the FBI, has examined hair which might be that of a Bigfoot; when this took place, if it did take place; what the results of the analysis were." [Titanosaur Photos: Meet the Largest Dinosaur on Record]

He didn't indicate why he suspected that the FBI might have done such an analysis, only that, "from time to time we have been informed that hair, supposedly of a Bigfoot… has been examined by the FBI., and with the conclusion, as a report of the examination, that it was not possible to compare the hair with that of any known creature on this continent."

Byrne appears to have been concerned that the agency wouldn't take The Bigfoot Information Center seriously.

"Please understand that our research here is serious," he wrote, "That this is a serious question that needs answering."

He also assured the agency that they needn't worry about his implying their involvement in his work.

"An examination of hair, or the opposite, but the FBI., does not in any way, as far as we are concerned, suggest that the FBI., is associated with our project or confirms in any way the possibility of the existence of the creature(s) known as Bigfoot," he wrote.

Assistant FBI Director of the agency's laboratory division Jay Cochran Jr. replied two weeks later, on Sept. 10, 1976.

"Since the publication of the 'Washington Environmental Atlas' in 1975, which referred to such examinations, we have received several inquiries similar to yours," he wrote. "However, we have been unable to locate any references to such examinations in our files."

More than two months later, on Nov. 24, 1976, Byrne replied. Perhaps emboldened by the earlier response, he asked not for information but for a favor. [Real or Not? The Science Behind 12 Unusual Sightings]

"Briefly, we do not often come across hair which we are unable to identify, and the hair that we have now, about 15 hairs attached to a tiny piece of skin, is the first that we have obtained in six years which we feel may be of importance," he wrote.

He asked if Cochran "could possibly arrange for a comparative analysis" of the tissue to determine its origin.

At the time all this was going on, Bigfoot was in the news. Byrne had been searching for the creature for five years, supported by the Academy of Applied Science (AAS), a small institution in Boston that, according to a document in the file, also sponsored hunts for the Loch Ness monster.

The New York Times had profiled the 50-year-old Byrne's adventures in June of 1976, calling him a "former professional hunter in Nepal who switched from tiger shooting and yeti hunting to tiger conservation and Bigfoot hunting."

"Most [Bigfoot sightings] are eventually discounted as insubstantial or faked," The New York Times wrote. "But a handful hold up and are given high credibility. So far Mr. Byrne, though he has never seen a Bigfoot himself, has collected the details of 94 reported sightings that seem believable. There are many more reports of tracks."

The paper recounted several of those supposedly more credible sightings, and a clipping of that article was included in the FBI file. The next document in the file, in chronological order, was Cochran's instruction to examine the hairs Byrne passed along.

"This does not represent a change in Bureau policy," a memorandum included in the file states, in an apparent effort to justify the decision. "The … Laboratory Branch has a history of making its unique services and expertise available to the Smithsonian Institution, other museums, universities and government agencies in archeological matters and in the interest of research and legitimate scientific inquiry." [The 25 Most Mysterious Archaeological Finds on Earth]

Unfortunately for Bigfoot hunters, the results weren't what they may have hoped. In 1977, the lab examined the 15 hairs. A final letter from Cochran, addressed to Howard S. Curtis, Executive Vice President of the AAS, read like this:

"Dear Mr. Curtis,

The hairs which you recently delivered to the FBI Laboratory on behalf of the Bigfoot Information Center and Exhibition have been examined by transmitted and incident light microscopy. The examination included a study of morphological characteristics such as root structure, medullary structure and cuticle thickness in addition to scale casts. Also the hairs were compared directly with hairs of known origin under a comparison microscope.

It was concluded as a result of these examinations that the hairs are of deer family origin.

The hair sample you submitted is being returned as an enclosure to this letter,

Sincerely yours,

Jay Cochran, Jr.

Assistant Director FBI

Scientific and Technical Services Division."

Curtis replied March 8, thanking Cochran and saying he'd pass the news on to Byrne when the monster hunter returned from Nepal.

You can read the full FBI Bigfoot file here.

Live Science has reached out to Byrne for additional comment, and will update this article if he replies.

• Rumor or Reality: The Creatures of Cryptozoology
• Top Ten Unexplained Phenomena
• 10 Beasts and Dragons: How Reality Made Myth
• The most famous Bigfoot sightings

Originally published on Live Science.

There are few things in life more permanent and guaranteed than death. Yet, that doesn't stop us from imagining what life would be like if death was only temporary.

In AMC's "Fear the Walking Dead," returning Sunday, June 2, at 9 p.m. EDT/8 p.m. CDT, reanimated human corpses roam the world, having avoided the permanent stillness of death only to devour the living. Now, we know zombies aren't real, but reanimated corpses aren't exactly a figment of the imagination. Scientists have been attempting to restore life to the dead for hundreds of years.

In the 1800s, physicist Giovanni Aldini became famous for his spectacular demonstrations of "reanimating" human and animal corpses by stimulating them with powerful electrical shocks. He would hook a battery up to dismembered humans or animals and cause the corpse to convulse as though it were alive. Audience members were awestruck, despite the fact the creature never actually came back to life. Aldini knew he wasn't reviving the dead, but didn't shy away from the possibility, and neither did the scientists who followed him. [9 Reasons Why We Have an Undying Interest in the Undead]

Zombie animals

By the 1930s, attempts to resurrect the dead with electricity had fizzled but the fascination with reanimation was far from dead. One of the most famous scientists in the field of reanimation is Robert E. Cornish, an American biologist who studied at the University of California Berkeley. Cornish reportedly managed to revive two dogs by rocking them back and forth to move blood around while injecting the animals with a mixture of anticoagulants and steroids. When Cornish announced he was ready to perform his experiment on humans, a California death-row inmate, Thomas McMonigle, volunteered his body post-execution, but the State of California denied his request.

Recently, a team of researchers from Yale University have been experimenting with reanimating pig brains and published their findings in April in the journal Nature. The scientists restored brain activity and some cellular activity in pigs a few hours after the animals died in a slaughterhouse, Live Science reported. Although some brain cells began functioning again, it wasn't enough for the pigs to regain consciousness. Scientists not involved in the study told Live Science that the results throw into question what it means to be alive or brain-dead.

Zombie humans

Zombies are most certainly fake, but a few remarkable case studies suggest that some semblance of spontaneous resurrection is possible.

In 2011, 46-year-old woman Kelly Dwyer fell into a frozen pond while hiking alone in New Hampshire. Dwyer's heart stopped before the ambulance could reach her and her body temperature plummeted to near 60 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celsius), Popular Science reported. Dwyer had been dead for 5 hours when doctors switched off life support, and her heart spontaneously started again. After spending two weeks recovering in the hospital, Dwyer returned home alive and with no brain damage. She wasn't a zombie, but in a sense, she had come back from the dead.

Enough people have spontaneously come back to life several minutes after cardiac arrest that the instance has its own name: The Lazarus phenomenon. Not all of the people who experience the Lazarus phenomenon regain full neurological function or remain living for much longer, but a 2007 review estimated that about 35% of Lazarus phenomenon patients return to a normal, healthy life.

Even after hundreds of years of failed experiments, some scientists are still trying to manually reanimate human corpses. For the past three years, Bioquark, Inc., a U.S. biotechnology company, has been attempting to recruit 20 clinically dead patients for an experiment on reversing brain death. The study isn't scheduled to begin until July 2019, but has already received heavy criticism from the scientific community. A letter published in the journal Critical Care said "the trial borders on quackery," and "dead means dead."

Zombie fans might disagree.

Watch AMC's "Fear the Walking Dead" on Sundays starting June 2 at 9 p.m. EDT/8 p.m CDT.

• Exploring the Inevitable: Gallery of Death in Art
• Zombie Animals: 5 Real-Life Cases of Body-Snatching
• Top 10 Weird Ways We Deal With the Dead

Originally published on Live Science.

The Indian army has spurred an avalanche of jokes and bolstered the spirits of the occasional true believer with a tweet purporting to show evidence of the elusive yeti.

"For the first time, an #IndianArmy Mountaineering Expedition Team has sited Mysterious Footprints of mythical beast 'Yeti' measuring 32x15 inches close to Makalu Base Camp on 09 April 2019," the Indian army account tweeted yesterday (April 29). "This elusive snowman has only been sighted at Makalu-Barun National Park in the past."

The army has not given any indication that it is joking. According to The Times of India, officials said they were turning over the "evidence" to "subject matter experts" and wanted to go public to rekindle public interest in the mythical ape-like beast. [Real or Not? The Science Behind 12 Unusual Sightings]

Twitter users, though, immediately jumped on the opportunity for levity, with many tweeting goofy GIFs of dancing yeti and mocking the post.

The yeti is an old myth, originating with the people who call the Himalayas home. Its alternative name, the Abominable Snowman, came from a 1921 interview with British explorers of Mount Everest that was conducted by a journalist named Henry Newman. The adventurers claimed to have seen footprints on the mountain that their guide said came from a "metoh-kangmi," or "man-bear snow-man." Newman mistranslated "metoh" as "filthy," and then he decided to swap out that word for the more poetic "Abominable."

Alleged "yeti" have occasionally been sighted since, but none of the sightings has panned out. One of the most famous photographs of a purported yeti turned out to be a rock.

The pictures posted by the Indian army are hardly slam-dunk proof of a sighting. They consist of a few shots of a single-file line of impressions in snow that looks like it's experienced some partial melting — in one picture, small downhill lines show spots where chunks of snow or ice had skidded down the hillside. The tracks are indistinct and don't seem to preserve anything resembling claw or toe marks. Indeed, they look very little like something left by a bipedal animal, given that there is only one line of impressions.

Earlier yeti "evidence" has failed to provide any factual basis for the snow-loving creature. In 2011, a bone claimed to be a yeti finger turned out to belong to a long-dead human. And every sample of so-called "yeti hair" ever tested has turned out to belong to bears or dogs.

• The Real Roots of 7 Magical Beasts from Harry Potter
• Mythical Creatures: Beasts That Don't Exist (Or Do They?)
• The 12 Weirdest Animal Discoveries

Originally published on Live Science.

Organizers of an annual conference that brings together people who believe that the Earth is flat are planning a cruise to the purported edge of the planet. They're looking for the ice wall that holds back the oceans.

The journey will take place in 2020, the Flat Earth International Conference (FEIC) recently announced on its website. The goal? To test so-called flat-Earthers' assertion that Earth is a flattened disk surrounded at its edge by a towering wall of ice.

Details about the event, including the dates, are forthcoming, according to the FEIC, which calls the cruise "the biggest, boldest adventure yet." However, it's worth noting that nautical maps and navigation technologies such as global positioning systems (GPS) work as they do because the Earth is … a globe. [7 Ways to Prove the Earth Is Round]

Believers in a flat Earth argue that images showing a curved horizon are fake and that photos of a round Earth from space are part of a vast conspiracy perpetrated by NASA and other space agencies to hide Earth's flatness. These and other flat-Earth assertions appear on the website of the Flat Earth Society (FES), allegedly the world's oldest official flat Earth organization, dating to the early 1800s.

However, the ancient Greeks demonstrated that Earth was a sphere more than 2,000 years ago, and the gravity that keeps everything on the planet from flying off into space could exist only on a spherical world.

But in diagrams shared on the FES website, the planet appears as a pancake-like disk with the North Pole smack in the center and an edge "surrounded on all sides by an ice wall that holds the oceans back." This ice wall — thought by some flat-Earthers to be Antarctica — is the destination of the promised FEIC cruise.

There's just one catch: Navigational charts and systems that guide cruise ships and other vessels around Earth's oceans are all based on the principle of a round Earth, Henk Keijer, a former cruise ship captain with 23 years of experience, told The Guardian.

GPS relies on a network of dozens of satellites orbiting thousands of miles above Earth; signals from the satellites beam down to the receiver inside of a GPS device, and at least three satellites are required to pinpoint a precise position because of Earth's curvature, Keijer explained.

"Had the Earth been flat, a total of three satellites would have been enough to provide this information to everyone on Earth," Keijer said. "But it is not enough, because the Earth is round."

Whether or not the FEIC cruise will rely on GPS or deploy an entirely new flat-Earth-based navigation system for finding the end of the world, remains to be seen.

• Religion and Science: 6 Visions of Earth's Core
• 101 Images of a Round Earth Taken from Space
• 8 Times Flat-Earthers Tried to Challenge Science (and Failed) in 2017

Originally published on Live Science.

True, that's a dramatic and highly unlikely situation — but would you know where to start?

In AMC's "The Walking Dead" (which airs Sundays at 9 p.m. EST/8 p.m. CST), characters have survived years after the zombie apocalypse began and are now living in communities that demand a stable food supply. Farming is a major part of that, but with limited space and resources, the settlers have to figure out how to make the most of their efforts. [9 Reasons We Have an Undying Interest in the Undead]

Live Science spoke with Dan Kemper, an organic farmer and the field foreman at the Rodale Institute, a nonprofit organic farming research and education organization in Pennsylvania, to learn a few helpful tips for farming during an apocalypse, or anytime.

Focus on nutrition gold mines

"If you're in a situation where you didn't have any tractor equipment and were limited on space, you want to go for the nutrient-dense crops," Kemper said. "Things like potatoes, garlic, onions and sweet potatoes."

Kemper immediately rattled off those four crops for a few reasons. First, they're nutritious.

"Potatoes are super-packed with nutrients," Kemper said. A medium potato contains about 42 grams of vitamin C, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). They're also loaded with minerals, like calcium, magnesium, phosphorus and potassium.

Another upside to potatoes, Kemper thought of: "You can ferment them into booze and you can trade that." Indeed, participating in trade is key to building a successful civilization, as Live Science previously reported.

Sweet potatoes are also nutritious and are chock-full of vitamin A in the form of beta-carotene. Vitamin A plays a role in healthy vision, skin and bones, and works as an antioxidant, which is a chemical that fights free radicals that may damage cells. Sweet potatoes are also relatively high in potassium, an important mineral for maintaining heart and muscle health.

Besides being flavorful and delicious, onions and garlic are two closely related veggies that have many layers of nutrition.

"Onions are super-healthy," Victoria Jarzabkowski, a nutritionist with the Fitness Institute of Texas at the University of Texas at Austin, previously told Live Science. "They are excellent sources of vitamin C, sulfuric compounds, flavonoids and phytochemicals." 

Kemper said he chose garlic because it's rich in a sulfur-based chemical called allicin, which gets released when the garlic bulb is cut or crushed. Allicin is thought to work as an antioxidant, and there's some evidence that it supports immune system health, too. The allicin in garlic could help keep people from getting sick, Kemper said.

Grow more, water less

These four crops also don't need a lot of water. "I would assume all of the water would be for drinking, so the garlic, onion and potatoes don't need a ton of irrigation," Kemper said.

It would also be important to consider that few things grow in the winter. Even in Georgia, where the characters in "The Walking Dead" have set up their communities, the winters are cold enough to prohibit most crops from growing, and the settlers would need to live off stored food.

Fortunately, the crops Kemper suggested can be stored for a long time. "You can pretty much just throw them in a sack or bin out of the sun and out of the rain," Kemper said.

The winter would also allow time for the soil to recover between crops. In a normal setting, Kemper said, farmers let their fields rest over winter and plant what's called a cover crop. Cover crops, such as legumes or grasses, are grown primarily to maintain soil quality over the winter. "Then you could plant whatever you want in the spring," Kemper said. 

Whatever crops were planted would need to be rotated each season to keep the soil healthy, Kemper added. Rotating crops prevents the soil from becoming depleted of the same nutrients over and over because different crops pull different nutrients from the soil.

"It's always better to rotate," Kemper said.

What about pests?

One of the issues farmers on "The Walking Dead" are facing this season is how to get rid of pests, particularly crows. There are many options to try, such as scarecrows or shiny ribbons.

But the sure-fire way to get rid of any vertebrate pests is to kill them, Kemper said. "It's the best thing to do." It's not glamorous but it saves your crops and provides more food, he said. Roasted crow, anyone?

But what about the pesky crop-eating bugs? Ideally, pesticides would be the easiest solution, but chemicals like that probably aren't available during a zombie apocalypse.

So, the crops might require individual, hands-on attention.

At the Rodale Institute, Kemper said that every now and then, rain washes away the organic-approved pesticides they have applied to the crops, so they have to manually clean the bugs off every plant one by one.  

"We get buckets that are half full of water and bleach and we hand shake the plant to get the bugs off," he said. It's a tedious but effective method for keeping crops healthy.

Consider including livestock

Besides growing a few key crops, the apocalypse settlers might want to consider raising animals.

"Chickens are a great idea," Kemper said. "They're really quick to raise, and you can keep a few that lay eggs and keep the eggs."

Larger livestock might to be too challenging, he said. "Cows and pigs and goats will be a lot of work."

He suggested maybe start with one other livestock animal at a time and raise it for a season. Just one cow could provide enough food for everyone for a winter, he said. And, depending on the animal, its fat could be used to make soap — an important ingredient for keeping things sanitary and people healthy.

Space might also be limited, meaning not enough room for both livestock and crop fields. Kemper estimated that about three or four acres of crops would be needed to keep about a dozen people fed for a year, with a little extra to spare for emergencies. If that's the case, the hundred or so people in the communities of "The Walking Dead" can't depend solely on their small farms.

"They would need concentration on hunting and gathering still," Kemper said. "So, stay well-armed."

Catch "The Walking Dead," on Sundays at 9 p.m. EST/8 p.m. CST on AMC.

Originally published on Live Science.

Halloween is a time when ghosts and spooky decorations are on public display, reminding us of the realm of the dead. But could they also be instructing us in important lessons on how to lead moral lives?

Roots of Halloween

The origins of modern-day Halloween go back to "samhain," a Celtic celebration for the beginning of the dark half of the year when, it was widely believed, the realm between the living and the dead overlapped and ghosts could be commonly encountered.

In 601 A.D., to help his drive to Christianize northern Europe, Pope Gregory I directed missionaries not to stop pagan celebrations, but rather to Christianize them.

Accordingly, over time, the celebrations of samhain became All Souls' Day and All Saint's Day, when speaking with the dead was considered religiously appropriate. All Saint's Day was also known as All Hallows' Day and the night before became All Hallows' Evening, or "Hallowe'en."

Christian ghosts

Not only did the pagan beliefs around spirits of the dead continue, but they also became part of many of early church practices.

Pope Gregory I himself suggested that people seeing ghosts should say masses for them. The dead, in this view, might require help from the living to make their journey towards Heaven.

During the Middle Ages, beliefs around souls trapped in purgatory led to the church's increasing practice of selling indulgences – payments to the church to reduce penalties for sins. The widespread belief in ghosts turned the sale of indulgences into a lucrative practice for the church.

It was such beliefs that contributed to the Reformation, the division of Christianity into Protestantism and Catholicism led by German theologian Martin Luther. Indeed, Luther's "95 Theses," that he nailed to the All Saints Church in Wittenburg on Oct. 31, 1517, was largely a protest against the selling of indulgences.

Subsequently, ghosts became identified with "Catholic superstitions" in Protestant countries.

Debates, however, continued about the existence of ghosts and people increasingly turned to science to deal with the issue. By the 19th century, Spiritualism, a new movement which claimed that the dead could converse with the living, was fast becoming mainstream, and featured popular techniques such as seances, the ouija board, spirit photography and the like.

Although Spiritualism faded in cultural importance after World War I, many of its approaches can be seen in the "ghost hunters" of today, who often seek to prove the existence of ghosts using scientific techniques.

A wide, wide world of ghosts

These beliefs are not just part of the Christian world. Most, although not all, societies have a concept of "ghosts." In Taiwan, for example, about 90 percent people report seeing ghosts.

Along with many Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, China and Vietnam, Taiwan celebrates a "Ghost Month," which includes a central "Ghost Day," when ghosts are believed to freely roam the world of the living. These festivals and beliefs are often tied to the Buddhist story of the Urabon Sutra, where Buddha instructs a young priest on how to help his mother whom he sees suffering as a "hungry ghost."

As in many traditions, Taiwanese ghosts are seen either as "friendly" or "unfriendly." The "friendly" ghosts are commonly ancestral or familial and welcomed into the home during the ghost festival. The "unfriendly" ghosts are those angry or "hungry" ghosts that haunt the living.

Role of ghosts in our lives

As a scholar who has studied and taught ghost stories for many years, I have found that ghosts generally haunt for good reasons. These could range from unsolved murders, lack of proper funerals, forced suicides, preventable tragedies and other ethical failures.

Ghosts, in this light, are often found seeking justice from beyond the grave. They could make such demands from individuals, or from societies as a whole. For example, in the U.S., sightings have been reported of African-American slaves and murdered Native Americans. Scholar Elizabeth Tucker details many of these reported sightings on university campuses, often tied in with sordid aspects of the campus's past.

In this way, ghosts reveal the shadow side of ethics. Their sightings are often a reminder that ethics and morality transcend our lives and that ethical lapses can carry a heavy spiritual burden.

Yet ghost stories are also hopeful. In suggesting a life after death, they offer a chance to be in contact with those that have passed and therefore a chance for redemption – a way to atone for past wrongs.

This Halloween, along with the shrieks and shtick, you may want to take a few minutes to appreciate the role of ghosts in our haunted pasts and how they guide us to lead moral and ethical lives.

Tok Thompson, Associate Professor of Teaching, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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