A police officer has recalled the moment he was lowered from a helicopter into a crocodile-infested river in South Africa as part of an effort to recover human remains. Captain Johan Potgieter was tasked with capturing a crocodile suspected of eating a businessman who had been swept away by
At 21, Rodney Wilkinson was the best fencer in South Africa: national champion in foil and sabre, second in epee. He had toured Europe and Argentina. He had not stood on the Olympic podium, because South Africa was banned. The apartheid state had taken that from him, along with everything
A beekeeper has been jailed for six months after she set swarms of her insects on sheriff’s deputies attempting to carry out an eviction at a friend’s house. Rebecca Woods insisted she only released her truckload of hives to allow the bees to enjoy the “lovely, flowering landscape”
Researchers from Cairo University and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have located two air-filled spaces within Giza’s Menkaure pyramid that hint at a possible secret entrance. The Menkaure pyramid is the smallest of the three main pyramids on Cairo’s Giza plateau. Built for the Fourth Dynasty
Here is the promise you and I must cling to across the thousands of words that follow: At some point within this text, I will reveal to you what—after 555 responses, 13,000 miles of travel, and months of monomaniacal research—I have determined to be the best free
Jack Parsons was one of the most influential figures in the history of the American space program. He also stood accused of espionage, and held a deep fascination with the occult. By 1939, Parsons and his wife Helen Parsons-Smith had fully embraced the teachings of the Ordo Templis Orientis,
Alan Robinson and Walter Macfarlane were born in Hawaii 15 months apart. The duo met in 6th grade and have been friends for 60 years. While they've shared a very close bond, they never thought they were related, until a DNA website revealed their relationship. Robinson was adopted,
As the woman was reading, she heard an unfamiliar voice say, "Please don't be afraid. I know it must be shocking for you to hear me speaking to you like this, but this is the easiest way I could think of. My friend and I used to
The FBI is looking for any connections among the recent deaths and disappearances of at least 10 scientists who had ties to government science projects or other sensitive information. Those who have died or disappeared include a nuclear physicist and MIT professor fatally shot outside his Massachusetts residence, a retired
It was 2004. I was 31. I was up for several days on meth and drinking heavily for the past month or so. I decide to go rob a bank and take my son to Tijuana, Mexico to see my biological father – his new grandpa. I’ve recently been discharged
Fujio Masuoka invented flash memory, a technology used in semiconductors with sales of $76 billion in 2001. These chips went into products worth more than $3 trillion, including automobiles, computers and mobile phones. Flash memory was the most important semiconductor innovation of the 1990s, and it should have made Masuoka
Hollywood actor Jason Segel spent an extended period of time in the Tampere region of Finland in late 2024, filming a movie. "I always try to be friendly. I say hello and ask how people are doing. However, that didn't work in Finland, where people are quite