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The moon-landing hoax still lives on, more than 50 years after Apollo 11 - the first crewed mission to land on the moon.

Phil Plait has mixed feelings about the moon-landing hoax.

Plait - known as "The Bad Astronomer" to his many thousands of readers on Syfy - told Space.com he is frustrated that he and others like him still have to debunk the hoax theory from time to time, 50 years after the first moon landing. Then again, Plait became famous because he's so good at debunking in the first place.

Back in February 2001, Fox Broadcasting ran a documentary titled "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?" Plait coincidentally had a pile of research ready from a book he was working on, and a friend sent him an advance copy of the show so that he had time to write up a response.

Related: Apollo moon-landing hoax theories that won't die

Plait's essay on his personal blog, which he published shortly after the show aired, quickly generated thousands of views years before Facebook, Twitter and today's social media even existed. Fox's TV show propelled Plait's writing to a large audience, and his 2002 book "Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing 'Hoax'" (Wiley) helped as well. Plait remains a popular science commentator nearly two decades later.

"I kind of wish it had never aired," Plait said about the Fox documentary, "because it opened a huge Pandora's box. On the other hand, it's exposing a wound to sunlight. That thing was there anyway, festering. Let it get out to the public, and let it heal, and let it kill the infection. But yeah, it's troubling. Just to know that if Fox hadn't aired that, who knows what my career path would have been."

Moon hoax theory and popular culture

Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface on July 20, 1969. Even back then, some people were sceptical that the feat was technologically possible. The James Bond movie "Diamonds Are Forever," for example, had a joke about faked moon landings just two years later, in 1971.

But what really propelled the conspiracy theory into popular culture, Plait said, was the 1978 Peter Hyams film "Capricorn One," which portrays a faked human landing on Mars. (Also, a 1976 self-published pamphlet by Bill Kaysing, "We Never Went to the Moon," was popular among conspiracy-minded people of the day.)

That was over 40 years ago, but moon-hoax enthusiasts are still with us today.

"The X-Files" brought all sorts of space conspiracies into the public consciousness in the 1990s and 2000s, and the rebooted version of the show addressed the moon landing in a 2018 episode. The conspiracy was also addressed in many other fictional TV shows, from "Futurama" to "Friends."

Meanwhile, some documentary films and reality-TV efforts - a 2008 episode of "MythBusters," for example - tried to chase away the conspiracy theory by educating people. Other filmmakers, such as the folks behind the 2002 mockumentary "Dark Side of the Moon," spoofed moon hoaxers.

Opinion polls over the years regularly show that around 5% of Americans believe the Apollo moon landings were faked, former NASA chief historian Roger Launius told the Associated Press. That's more than 16 million people, assuming a U.S. population of 327 million.

NASA has done a lot of debunking work over the decades, including a 2018 offer to NBA superstar Stephen Curry to view moon rocks at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston after Curry said he didn't believe in the moon landings. (A few days later, Curry said he made the comments in jest.)

In early 2019, NASA spokesperson Allard Beutel recited a pile of evidence supporting the moon landings to The Washington Post. He mentioned the returned moon rocks, the ability to bounce laser beams off gear the astronauts left behind and images NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter took of the Apollo landing sites in 2011. Nevertheless, even former astronauts have found themselves in the fray.

Space shuttle astronaut Leland Melvin tackled the topic in the 2019 Science Channel series " Truth Behind the Moon Landing," which also features Space.com Editor-in-Chief Tariq Malik as a guest. And in 2002, Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin punched moon-landing denier Bart Sibrel in the jaw during a taped confrontation. (Police later said Aldrin was provoked, and no charges were filed.)
Related: Best sci-fi movies of all time
Should we even talk about the moon-landing hoax?

Plait said there is a danger in talking about the moon-landing conspiracy and other clearly debunked space conspiracies like it, such as vaccines causing autism or humans not being responsible for climate change. It's possible, he said, that by airing any of these debates, the media gives legitimacy to the conspiracy. Plait said he sometimes struggles about whether to address a conspiracy in his blog; he tries to discuss ones that are widely talked about already.

But it's a tough job in fast-moving social media. Plait said he recently commented on what appeared to be widespread Twitter backlash about the new version of "The Little Mermaid" starring black actress Halle Bailey, only to discover the backlash was itself likely faked. Plait took down his original tweet and wrote a correction. (The genesis of the viral tweet was from a troll account, according to a tweet by Buzzfeed's Brandon Wall.)

Plait said we should remember that conspiracy beliefs often have real-life effects. For example: "Because of the anti-vax movement, babies are dying, kids are dying, older people are dying, people with compromised immune systems are dying." Extreme weather events driven in part by climate change are killing people as well, he said.

Related: The Apollo Moon Landings: How They Worked (Infographic)

Plait clarified that he did not blame any particular political position for this strife - not even the alt-right, as it doesn't "play into their ideology" (which he said targets people of certain religious groups). But nevertheless, he added, "All of this stuff has been corralling the imagination of the American public and forcing it in a direction to not think critically, and to react instead of sitting and thinking a moment about things, and to doubt - even when you can lay a paper trail from Point A to Point B right in front of someone. They won't believe it."

But Plait still tries. He remembers being on a radio show not too long ago, going over the usual arguments conspiracy theorists use - for example, why are there no stars in the sky in Apollo pictures of the lunar surface? (The reason is the cameras had fast exposure times and the stars were too faint to show.)
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the film "Capricorn One" was directed by Stanley Kubrick. It was directed by Peter Hyams.
"Then somebody called in with some bizarre, trivial thing that made no sense at all," Plait recalled, "and bless him, the radio host jumped in and said, 'Listen. This guy said your 10 biggest claims are wrong. At what point do you back down?'"

Additional resources

To see some of the wildest moon-landing conspiracy theories debunked, check out out this article by history.com. If you want to know why we know that we went to the moon, this article by the Institute of Physics has got you covered. Still looking for even more moon-related content? Why not check out this list of 38 moon movies on Rotten Tomatoes.

Bibliography

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Moon-landing hoax still lives on. But why?

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The moon-landing hoax is still believed by some - over 50 years since Apollo 11. We look at why people still think the whole thing never happened.

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/ CBS News

In his book, "Spare," Prince Harry writes about how he responded in the days and years following the death of his mother, Princess Diana, in 1997. Harry didn't believe Diana was dead, he told Anderson Cooper.

"For a long time, I just refused to accept that she was- she was gone," Harry said. "Part of, you know, she would never do this to us, but also part of, maybe this is all part of a plan."

"You really believed," Cooper asked, "that maybe she had just decided to disappear for a time?"

"For a time, and then that she would call us and that we would go and join her, yeah," said Harry, who was 12 when his mother died.

"How long did you believe that?" Cooper asked.

"Years. Many, many years," Harry said. "And William and I talked about it as well. He had- he had similar thoughts."

"You write in the book," Cooper said, "'I'd often say it to myself first thing in the morning, 'Maybe this is the day. Maybe this is the day that she's gonna reappear.''"

"Yeah, hope. I had huge amounts of hope," Harry said.

When Prince Harry was 20, he asked to see the police report about the crash that killed his mother, her boyfriend, Dodi Al-Fayed, and their driver, Henri Paul, while they were being pursued by photographers in a Paris tunnel.

"The files contained photographs of the crash scene," Cooper said. "Why did you want to see it?"

"Mainly proof," Harry said. "Proof that she was in the car. Proof that she was injured. And proof that the very paparazzi that chased her into the tunnel were the ones that were taking photographs- photographs of her lying half dead on the back seat of the car."

"You write in the book, 'I hadn't been aware before this moment,' talking about looking at the pictures of the crash scene, 'that the last thing Mummy saw on this earth was a flash bulb,'" Cooper said. "That's what you saw in the pictures?"

"Uh-huh," Harry said, affirmingly. "Well, they were- the pictures showed the reflection of a group of photographers taking photographs through the window, and the reflection on the window was- was them."

"You could actually see the photographers in the reflection?" Cooper asked.

"Yup," Harry said.

He only saw some of the crash photos. His private secretary and adviser dissuaded him from looking at the rest.

"All I saw was the back of my mum's head slumped on the back seat," Harry said. "There were other more gruesome photographs, but I will be eternally grateful to him for denying me the ability to inflict pain on myself by seeing that. Because that's the kind of stuff that sticks in your mind forever."

Harry said, he clung to the fantasy that his mother might have survived until he visited Paris for the first time at age 23.

"You told your driver, 'I want to go to the tunnel where my mom died?'" Cooper asked.

"I wanted to see," Harry said. "I wanted to see whether it was possible driving at the speed that Henri Paul was driving that you could lose control of a car and plow into a pillar killing almost everybody in that car. I need to take this journey. I need to ride the same route where-"

"The same tunnel, the same speed, your mother was going," Cooper said.

"All of it," Harry said. "Yup. Because William and I had already been told, 'The event was like a bicycle chain. If you remove one of those chains, the end result would not have happened.' And the paparazzi chasing was part of that. But yet, everybody got away with it."

A 2006 investigation by London's Metropolitan Police concluded that Diana's driver, Henri Paul, had been drinking and the crash was a "tragic accident."

"William and I considered reopening the inquest," Harry said. "Because there were so many gaps and so many holes in it. It just didn't add up and didn't make sense."

"Would you still like to do that?" Cooper asked.

"I don't even know if it's an option now," Harry said. "But no, I think- brrrr- would I like to do that now? It's a hell of a question, Anderson."

"Do you feel you have the answers that you need to have about what happened to your mother?" Cooper asked.

"Truth be known, no. I don't think I do," Harry said. "And I don't think my brother does either. I don't think the world does. Do I need any more than I already know? No. I don't think it would change much."

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Prince Harry says he held out hope Princess Diana might still be alive and in hiding for years after her death

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Harry tells Anderson Cooper he still has questions about what happened to his mother.

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Breaking News, Analysis, Politics, Blogs, News Photos, Video, Tech Reviews - TIME.com

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A new initiative revives one of the great literary controversies: that the Bard was not who we think he was

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UFO believers look for suspicious spacecraft during a UFO and Vortex Tour in Sedona, Arizona. This composite image is a combination of six photographs taken in 2017 through night vision goggles.

Each year, Area 51's mythology draws tourists from around the world. People come to the air base near Rachel, Nevada, in hopes to catch a glimpse of otherworldly spacecrafts.

The legend of Area 51 has been discredited for years-but some of its history is based on true events. Here's what you need to know about Area 51.

Where is Area 51?

About 120 miles northwest of Las Vegas, somewhere between mile markers 29 and 30 along Nevada's "Extraterrestrial Highway" (State Highway 375), lies an unmarked dirt road. Although no buildings are visible from the asphalt, the track leads to Groom Lake or Homey Airport-as it's called on civilian aviation maps.

For those in the know, this road leads to a military base with many unofficial names: Paradise Ranch; Watertown; Dreamland Resort; Red Square; The Box; and The Ranch; Nevada Test and Training Range; Detachment 3, Air Force Flight Test Centre (Det. 3, AFFTC); and Area 51.

Before World War II, the area near Groom Lake was used for silver and lead mining. Once the war began, the military took over the remote area and began conducting research: mainly nuclear and weapons testing.

Why build a secret base in the desert?

When the CIA started developing spy reconnaissance planes during the Cold War, then-CIA Director Richard Bissell, Jr. realised a private base was needed to build and test prototypes.

In 1955, he and Lockheed aircraft designer Kelly Johnson selected the secluded airfield at Groom Lake to be their headquarters. The Atomic Energy Commission added the base to the existing map of the Nevada Test Site and labeled the site Area 51.

Within eight months, engineers developed the U-2 plane, which could soar at an altitude of 70,000 feet-much higher than any other aircraft at the time. This allowed pilots to fly well above Soviet radar, missiles, and enemy aircraft.

After a U-2 was shot down by a Soviet anti-air missile in 1960, the CIA began developing the next generation of spy plane at Area 51: the titanium-bodied A-12. Nearly undetectable to radar, the A-12 could fly across the continental United States in 70 minutes at 2,200 miles an hour. The plane also was equipped with cameras that could, from an altitude of 90,000 feet, photograph objects just one-foot long on the ground.

Aliens and UFOs become part of Area 51 lore

Area 51 became forever associated with aliens in 1989 after a man claiming to have worked there, Robert Lazar, gave an interview with a Las Vegas news station. Lazar claimed that Area 51 housed and studied alien spacecraft and that his job was to recreate the technology for military use.

However, Lazar's credentials were soon discredited: according to school records Lazar never went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or California Institute of Technology, as he claimed. At the time though, engineers at Area 51 were studying and recreating advanced aircraft-just aircraft acquired from other countries, not from outer space.

Nevertheless, with all of the high-tech flights out of Area 51-including more than 2,850 takeoffs by the A-12-reports of unidentifiable flying objects skyrocketed in the area.

"The aircraft's titanium body, moving as fast as a bullet, would reflect the sun's rays in a way that could make anyone think, UFO," sources told journalist Annie Jacobsen for her 2011 book on Area 51.

Is the truth out there?

The government formally acknowledged the existence of Area 51 for the first time in 2013 when the CIA declassified documents about the development of the U-2 and A-12. Previously, locals knew something odd was happening in the desert but details were scarce and hard to verify.

Area 51 is still an active base-but the purpose it has served since the 1970s is a top-secret mystery. It will be a few more decades, at least, until current work is declassified and available to the public.

Even today, Area 51 draws believers and skeptics who frequent the small but thriving trail of alien-themed museums, restaurants, motels, parades, and festivals-all in hopes of discovering that the truth really is out there.

Photographer Jennifer Emerling has spent time photographing UFO culture in the American West. See more photos from the project on her website Welcome, Earthlings and her Instagram.

Editor's note: This story was originally published on September 20, 2019. It has been updated.

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The legend of Area 51-and why it still fascinates us

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Secluded in the Nevada desert, the military base has long been associated with alien and UFO sightings. Here's the real history behind the conspiracy theories.

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Pivotal events have a way of attracting harmful myths and conspiracy theories. This goes for great achievements like the moon landing (which Buzz Aldrin punched a guy for denying) as well as great tragedies like Martin Luther King Jr. 's assassination, the 9/11 attacks and the disaster.

Late in the evening on April 14, 1912, the R.M.S. Titanic hit an iceberg and sank into the icy waters of the North Atlantic, killing 1,517 of the 2,223 passengers and crew members aboard. To make sense of this tragic and seemingly random disaster, people over the past century have told stories of ominous signs of bad luck that were supposedly ignored beforehand, or spun elaborate conspiracy theories to explain the "real" reason it sank.

Here, we explain the most enduring conspiracy theories and myths about the tragedy.

J.P. Morgan planned the disaster to kill his rivals.

According to this theory, millionaire banker J.P. Morgan planned the Titanic disaster to kill off rival millionaires Jacob Astor, Isidor Straus and Benjamin Guggenheim, who all perished aboard.

The theory hinges on the fact that Morgan had originally planned to sail on the Titanic but changed his mind shortly before it took off. Yet it doesn't offer any explanation for how he caused the ship to hit an iceberg and kill over 1,500 people, let alone the three men he supposedly intended to die. To top it off, the theory claims Morgan wanted to kill them because they opposed the creation of the Federal Reserve, even though Astor and Guggenheim don't appear to have taken a position on it and Straus actually supported it.

Alternative versions of this theory claim the Rothschild banking family or the Jesuits were the ones who arranged Astor, Straus and Guggenheim's deaths on the Titanic. As The Washington Post notes, invoking the Rothchilds as international conspirators is "a centuries-old anti-Semitic trope... The Rothschild family founded banking houses across Europe in the early 1800s, and they have been a favorite target of conspiracy theorists ever since."

This theory resurfaced recently in connection with QAnon, a far-right conspiracy theory detailing a supposed secret plot by an alleged "deep state" against U.S. President Donald Trump and his supporters.

The Titanic never sank.

People seem to love a good insurance fraud story, so maybe it's unsurprising that this conspiracy theory is one of the Titanic's most popular. This one posits that someone switched the Titanic with another White Star Line ship, the R.M.S. Olympic. But as Paul Burns, vice president and curator for the Titanic Museum Attractions in Missouri and Tennessee, points out, "it just doesn't make any sense."

This theory starts with the fact that the Olympic was damaged while sailing from Southampton, England to New York in September 1911, and had to return to Harland and Wolff's shipping yard in Belfast for repairs. The company repaired the Olympic and it sailed to New York and back. It returned to Belfast for more repairs in March 1912, a few weeks before the Titanic set sail.

The conspiracy theory claims that some person or people found the Olympic too severely damaged to be profitable, and so at some point switched it with the Titanic to purposefully ditch the damaged ship, reap the insurance money and, it seems, kill a bunch of people in the process.

There are a lot of holes in this theory, but one of the biggest is that the Titanic's insurance wasn't enough to cover the Olympic's loss. As J. Kent Layton writes in Conspiracies at Sea, "the switch conspiracy founders-quite literally-on its financial merits alone."

A mummy's curse doomed the Titanic.

One of the passengers who went down with the Titanic was William Stead, a British editor who subscribed to early 20th-century spiritualism and had spent the past several years claiming a cursed mummy was causing mysterious destruction and disaster in London. As with other myths about "Egyptian curses" and "Native American burial grounds," this myth played off of colonialists' anxiety about the people whose land they had plundered.

On board the Titanic, Stead happily repeated his tale of the mummy's curse to other passengers. After the ship sank, a survivor recounted Stead's story to the New York World, and the media picked it up. The next month, The Washington Post ran this headline: "Ghost of the Titanic: Vengeance of Hoodoo Mummy Followed Man Who Wrote Its History."

Burns says some people linked the "mummy's curse" to Egyptian artifacts that survivor (and hero) Margaret Brown really did take with her on the Titanic to deliver to a museum in Denver. In other versions of the story, the mummy was actually aboard the Titanic because the British Museum had sold it to an American who was shipping it home, Snopes reports.

But the truth is the so-called "unlucky mummy" is still at the British Museum, and no mummy was ever loaded onto the ship. It was an iceberg, not a curse, that sank the Titanic.

The ship's number read 'NO POPE' backwards.

One myth posits that Catholic employees of Harland and Wolff, the Belfast company that built the Titanic, were distressed that the ship's number, 3909 04, seemed to say "NO POPE" when viewed in a mirror. Was this a sign of bad luck that foretold the ship's doom?

Nope. The late Titanic historian Walter Lord wrote that he received letters from people in Ireland relaying this "NO POPE" story beginning in the mid-1950s. Yet as Burns pointed out in his 1986 book, The Night Lives On, there was no such number attached to the Titanic.

The hull number painted on the ship was 401, the same as its yard number at Harland and Wolff, and its Board of Trade number was 131,428. Yet even if one of its numbers had read "NO POPE," there weren't any Catholic workers at Harland and Wolff for it to upset. The company had driven its Catholic employees away in the late 1800s, and "by the twentieth century, Harland and Wolff had a reputation for only employing Protestants," writes Annie Caulfield in Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry.

Despite this reality, Paul Burns, of the Titanic Museum Attractions in Missouri and Tennessee, says that visitors still occasionally ask about this myth.

Jack Dawson is Jay Gatsby.

OK, this one is actually about the 1997 Titanic movie-and it's a fan theory-but still. There is a theory on the internet that Leonardo DiCaprio'scharacter in Titanic and his character in The Great Gatsby are the same person.

"[T]he movie is obviously an alternate timeline where he survived the sinking of the ship and went on to build a life for himself in America in an attempt to reunite with Rose," writes Chris Lough on Tor.com, a science fiction and fantasy site. "He survives, builds himself into a party-going showman in the Jazz Age in hopes that Rose will one day appear, but ends up finding love with another woman, Daisy."

Because this one is about fictional characters in film, it isn't something we can prove or disprove. We'll leave it up to you to decide if Jack really is the Great Gatsby.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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The Craziest Titanic Conspiracy Theories, Explained | HISTORY

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Did a mummy's curse cause the Titanic to sink?

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Fifty years ago, a Detroit DJ accidentally started the biggest hoax in rock & roll history: the "Paul is dead" craze. It blew up on October 12, 1969, when Russ Gibb was hosting his show on WKNR. A mysterious caller told him to put on the Beatles' White Album and spin the "number nine, number nine" intro from "Revolution 9" backwards. When Gibb tried it on the air, he heard the words, "Turn me on, dead man." The clues kept coming. At the end of "Strawberry Fields Forever," John says, "I buried Paul." What could it all mean?

It meant the Beatles were hiding a secret: Paul McCartney got killed in a car crash back in 1966, and the band replaced him with an imposter. The rumor spread like wildfire, as fans searched their Beatle albums for clues. Fifty years later, "Paul is dead" remains the weirdest and most famous of all music conspiracy theories. It became a permanent part of Beatles lore-a totally fan-generated phenomenon that the band could only watch with amusement or exasperation. As Paul told Rolling Stone in 1974, "Someone from the office rang me up and said, 'Look, Paul, you're dead.' And I said, 'Oh, I don't agree with that.'"

Needless to say, it wasn't true - Paul is not just gloriously alive, he's still peaking as a songwriter and performer, debuting at Number One last year with Egypt Station. But after the Detroit radio broadcast, people pounced on the story. Two days later, the Michigan Daily explained the Abbey Road cover as a funeral procession: the Preacher (John in white), the Undertaker (Ringo in black), the Corpse (poor Macca). And bringing up the rear, George in blue denim as the grave-digger-man, even in the conspiracy theories, George gets shafted with the dirty work.

Here's how the rumor went, as summed up by Nicholas Schaffner in The Beatles Forever: Paul died on November 9, 1966. He drove away from Abbey Road late the night before - a "stupid bloody Tuesday" - then blew his mind out in a car. He was Officially Pronounced Dead ("O.P.D.") on Wednesday morning at 5 o'clock, which is why George points to that line on the Sgt. Pepper sleeve, while Paul wears an "O.P.D." patch. But the other Beatles decided to hush up the news, so Wednesday-morning papers didn't come. Somehow, they kept Paul's death a secret, replaced him with a look-alike, then dropped sly hints about the cover-up scam. The imposter wrote "Hey Jude" and "Blackbird," which means he's the guy who probably should have had Paul's job in the first place.

Fans began whispering about all the clues on the just-released Look at that cover - Paul's barefoot, out of step with the others, holding a cigarette in his right hand. (The real Paul was a lefty.) The Volkswagen with the "28 IF" license plate - that's how old Paul would have been if he were still alive. (He was 27.) No theory was too ridiculous to get taken seriously. Fans eagerly believed "walrus" is Greek for corpse (it isn't - it's Scandinavian) or that "goo goo goo joob" is what Humpty Dumpty says in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, before his fatal fall off the wall. (Nope, sorry.) " I Am the Walrus" ends with a live BBC broadcast of a fatal scene from Shakespeare's King Lear, with Oswald groaning, "O, untimely death!" (That one's true-John just taped it off the radio one night and liked how it fit the song.) And in "Glass Onion," John sings, "Here's another clue for you all / The Walrus was Paul."
Related: 100 Greatest Beatles Songs
When the rumor blew up, Paul was neither dead nor a walrus. He was in seclusion on his Scottish farm with Linda, Heather, and their six-week-old daughter Mary, known to the world as the infant cradled in his leather jacket in Linda's most famous photo. With a newborn baby to care for (a first for Paul), he was in no mood to indulge the media frenzy. As he told Rolling Stone, "They said, 'Look, what are you going to do about it? It's a big thing breaking in America. You're dead.' And so I said, leave it, just let them say it. It'll probably be the best publicity we've ever had, and I won't have to do a thing except stay alive. So I managed to stay alive through it."

John Lennon, calling the same Detroit radio station on October 26th, fumed, "It's the most stupid rumor I've ever heard. It sounds like the same guy who blew up my Christ remark." John denied any coded messages ("I don't know what Beatles records sound like backwards; I never play them backwards") or that he was the preacher at a funeral. "They said I was wearing a white religious suit. I mean, did Humphrey Bogart wear a white religious suit? All I've got is a nice Humphrey Bogart suit." John's pique was understandable - he was releasing his solo single "Cold Turkey" (the record where he finally ditched the "Lennon-McCartney" credit) and his Wedding Album with Yoko. The last thing on earth he wanted to talk about was Paul's bare feet.

The attorney F. Lee Bailey hosted a TV investigation, cross-examining witnesses like Allen Klein and Peter Asher. Beatles scholar Andru J. Reeve, in his wonderful history of the phenomenon, Turn Me On, Dead Man, gives transcripts of the TV trial. When Klein was asked why John said, "I buried Paul," he claimed, "On that particular take, his guitar buried Paul's sound." (Imagine: Allen Klein not giving a straight answer.) The record racks got flooded with quickie exploitations, like Jose Feliciano's "So Long Paul" (under the name Werbley Finster) and "Brother Paul" by Billy Shears & the All-Americans. The best of these tunes: " We're All Paul Bearers," by Zacherias and the Tree People. It was actually a decent Buffalo Springfield imitation, with the lament: "See the patch insinuation 'O.P.D.' on his sleeve / Wearing black sweet carnation while bringing mystery."

Something about the Beatles had always inspired death rumors, even in the early days. As Mark Lewisohn reports in , when original bassist Stu Sutcliffe quit in 1961, " Mersey Beat printed a letter from a fan asking if it was true that this member of the Beatles had been killed in a car crash." But this one was different. The novelist Richard Price, in a hilarious 1984 memoir for Rolling Stone, recalls listening to a 1969 college-radio show with fans sharing their off-the-wall theories. ("'Here Comes The Sun' played backwards at 78 rpm says, 'Woe is Paul.'") He calls the DJ, just for the kick of hearing his voice on the radio. "You know what eighty-four per cent of all the coffins in England are made of?...It might even be eighty-seven per cent...Norwegian Wood."

At first, the Fabs' long-suffering press officer Derek Taylor brushed off the latest hoax: "Ahh, they're always trying to start one of those. It's happened before. The calls will stop coming in a few days." But this time, the calls didn't stop. Richard DiLello's book The Longest Cocktail Party gives an inside account of the chaos that hit Apple. With Paul off the grid in Scotland, Taylor kept denying the gossip with all his usual charm: "The Paul McCartney who wrote 'And I Love Her' still loves you, and is still alive, and has a lot to write. There are a thousand songs unwritten and much to do." But in the Apple office, he added: "We'll start our own rumor that the public is dead from the neck up, and they've been using a stand-in facsimile of a brain for the past three and a half years."

Life magazine sent reporters out to stalk McCartney on his farm; after throwing a bucket of water on them, Paul agreed to an interview and photos, just to make this mess go away. In the November 9th cover story ("Paul McCartney Is Still With Us"), he casually added, "The Beatles thing is over." But nobody noticed. That's how over-the-top the whole hysteria was - Paul could drop a bombshell like this and people missed it, because they were too busy scrutinizing his chin or jaw for proof this was a fake. As he told Mojo in 2009, "I think the worst thing that happened was that I could see people sort of looking at me more closely: 'Were his ears always like that?'"

By 1970, nobody seriously believed Paul was dead. But for some reason, the story remained hugely popular, long after it was debunked - it became a timeless ritual of fan culture to check out the clues for yourself. Countless Paul-bearers over the years have held up a butter knife to the back cover of Abbey Road, so we could see the reflection of a human skull. (It's there, to the right of the "S.") Or put on Side Two of the White Album, dropped the needle on the vinyl right after "I'm So Tired," and spun it backwards to hear the words: "Paul is dead, man, miss him, miss him." Hell, the cover of his first solo album was a bowl of cherries - as in "Life is just..." - but the bowl was empty, which could only mean Paul was starting the world's first posthumous solo career.

As we all know now, John was saying "cranberry sauce," not "I buried Paul," and the "O.P.D." patch said "O.P.P.," a gift from the Ontario Provincial Police. But that didn't spoil anyone's fun. As Schaffner wrote, it's "a genuine folk tale of the mass communications era." The story outlived Russ Gibb, who died in April 2019. (Paul did not comment.) It also outlasted the band - as it turns out, something major really did happen to the Beatles on November 9, 1966. It was the day John met Yoko.

Fortunately, Paul is still around to celebrate this anniversary - he's always been bemused by the whole thing, even calling one album Paul Is Live. It was more than just a rock-star rumor-it inspired ordinary fans to turn into detectives, and permanently changed the way people consume music. "Paul is dead" walked so "Tupac is alive" and "Stevie Wonder can see" and "there are 12 different Avril Lavignes" could run. Every time Taylor Swift hints you should count the palm trees in her new video, she's tapping into the 28 IF legacy. ( She buried John Mayer.) The whole phenomenon, however accidentally, shows how crazy and devoted fan love can get. And that's really why the "Paul is dead" legend lives on. It's a tribute to all the life in the music. Long live the Beatles - and long live Paul.

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'Paul Is Dead': The Bizarre Story of Music's Most Notorious Conspiracy Theory

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Fifty years ago, a Detroit DJ accidentally started the biggest hoax in rock & roll history: the "Paul is dead" craze. It blew up on October 12, 1969, when Russ Gibb was hosting his show on WKNR. A mysterious caller told him to put on the Beatles' White Album and spin the "number nine, number nine" intro from "Revolution 9" backwards.

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The death of JFK: The never-ending conspiracy

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On the very day John F. Kennedy died, a cottage industry was born. Fifty years and hundreds of millions of dollars later, it’s still thriving. Its product? The “truth” about the president’s assassi…

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Why Do Some People Think Elvis Is Still Alive?

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Elvis Presley died 40 years ago, but some people still think he's alive. Here are the many conspiracy theories about the singer's death.

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NASA

It's now been nearly four decades since Neil Armstrong took his "giant leap for mankind" — if, that is, he ever set foot off this planet. Doubters say the U.S. government, desperate to beat the Russians in the space race, faked the lunar landings, with Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin acting out their mission on a secret film set, located (depending on the theory) either high in the Hollywood Hills or deep within Area 51. With the photos and videos of the Apollo missions only available through NASA, there's no independent verification that the lunar landings were anything but a hoax.

The smoking gun? Film of Aldrin planting a waving American flag on the moon, which critics say proves that he was not in space. The flag's movement, they say, clearly shows the presence of wind, which is impossible in a vacuum. NASA says Aldrin was twisting the flagpole to get the moon soil, which caused the flag to move. (And never mind that astronauts have brought back hundreds of independently verified moon rocks.) Theorists have even suggested that filmmaker Stanley Kubrick may have helped NASA fake the first lunar landing, given that his 1968 film 2001: A Space Odessey proves that the technology existed back then to artificially create a spacelike set. And as for Virgil I. Grissom, Edward H. White and Roger B. Chaffee — three astronauts who died in a fire while testing equipment for the first moon mission? They were executed by the U.S. government, which feared they were about to disclose the truth.

Far-fetched as the hoax theory may seem, a 1999 Gallup poll showed that it's comparatively durable: 6% of Americans said they thought the lunar landings were fake, and 5% said they were undecided.

Next Jesus and Mary Magdalene

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It's now been nearly four decades since Neil Armstrong took his "giant leap for mankind" - if, that is, he ever set foot off this planet. Doubters say the U.S. government, desperate to beat the...

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*Note that this is a large topic with some mature themes. If you choose this, it will have to be approved by your adults.

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Freemason symbols have been the subject of conspiracy theories since the secret society was founded in the 18 th century. Freemasons have been persecuted in Francisco Franco's Spain, Benito Mussolini's Italy, and even inspired the first third party in American politics: the Anti-Masonic Party. Central to this distrust is Freemasonry's use of symbols that outsiders have been reading into for centuries.

"The confusing thing for outside observers is that Freemasons took historical symbols that predated them and coopted them to convey something genuine about Freemasonry, that it really did go back to medieval stonemasons or the Knights Templar or the Old Testament," says John Dickie, author of The Craft: How The Freemasons Made the Modern World. These symbols included pyramids, The Temple of Solomon, and multiple images associated with death and mortality from cultures around the world.

"Because of paranoia about Freemasonry and misgivings generated by its code of secrecy, people saw these symbols and began to believe Freemasons were sending secret messages," says Dickie. "There's a widespread belief that Freemasons have hidden symbols everywhere and there's something sinister about it."

The growth of the British Empire brought Freemasonry around the world, exporting fears of a global conspiracy along with it. Here are three alleged Freemason symbols hiding in plain sight and the stories behind them.

Symbols of Freemasonry on the Dollar Bill?

The reverse of the one dollar bill features the Great Seal of the United States. The seal includes an all-seeing eye, or the Eye of Providence, and a pyramid commonly believed to be a secret Freemason symbol placed there by the Illuminati. This is false.

The Founding Fathers added the Eye of Providence to the Great Seal to "show God watching over the New Republic, which was represented by the pyramid (meaning it was built to last) with its 13 levels (representing the thirteen original states)," writes Dickie in The Craft. When the Great Seal was adopted in 1782, "The mason's had not yet gotten around to incorporating the pyramid and all-seeing eye into their vast lexicon of symbols. It predates their usage," Dickie says.

The Great Seal was not even added to the dollar bill until 1935, during a redesign spearheaded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Secretary of Agriculture, Henry A. Wallace. While both men were 32 nd Degree Freemasons, they did not include the seal with freemasonry in mind-on the contrary, Dickie says, Roosevelt worried using the seal would offend Catholic voters. Instead, the President hoped the Latin inscription, NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM, or "New order of the ages," would remind voters of his New Deal.

Masonic Symbols in Layout of Washington, D.C.?

There is a lot of Masonic history in Washington, D.C., but its layout does not contain a hidden message. Symbols of Freemasonry are, however, displayed in plain sight. Many of the Founding Fathers were Freemasons, including George Washington. When the Capitol Building was first built, then-President Washington donned his Masonic apron to perform the Masonic cornerstone laying ceremony, consecrating the stone with wine, corn and oil before striking it with a ceremonial gavel.

"Washington thought that the United States, as a young, vulnerable republic, needed the kind of sense of the sacred and of public ceremony that other states got from religion and monarchy which the United States, with its religious openness and status as a republic, didn't have access to," says Dickie. "He thought Freemasons were great candidates for that public ceremonial role."

Did you know? Thirteen of the 39 men who signed the Constitution were Freemasons.

The George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Alexandria, Virginia has a gigantic statue of Washington in his apron, unveiled by Harry Truman, another Mason. The House of the Temple, headquarters of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, Southern Jurisdiction, has invited the public for tours since it opened in 1915 in Washington, D.C. "None of this is sneaky or secret," says Dickie. "This is Freemasons proclaiming their pride in being freemasons to the world."

Masonic Symbols in the Vatican?

Some have suggested that the obelisk in St. Peter's Square carries Masonic symbolism. But Arthur Goldwag, author of Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies, denies any link. "There is no truth to it," he says. The 4,000-year-old Egyptian obelisk at the center of St. Peter's Square was built long before Freemasonry was founded and brought to Rome by Emperor Caligula.

The surrounding pillars in the square are more Roman in influence than Masonic. Masonic pillars evoke the Temple of Solomon in the Old Testament, thus borrowing from a Judeo-Christian symbol, not the other way around. "Believing Masons and the Vatican are the joint enemy is core conspiracy theory," says Goldwag.

Freemasonry is not a religion, but all Freemasons must believe in a God-though which God is not specified. Initiates can be sworn in on religious texts ranging from the Bible to the Quran, and rites and symbols are drawn from multiple religions. This has raised the ire of several faiths-and the Catholic Church in particular.

In 1738, the Catholic Church issued a Papal Ban on Freemasons, and as late as 1983, the Pope declared "The faithful who enroll in Masonic associations are in a state of grave sin and may not receive Holy Communion."

That said, you need only to look up at Janiculum Hill from the Vatican to find a Masonic message to the Catholic Church: A giant statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi on horseback. Garibaldi, a Grand Mason known as the " Father of Italian Independence," was a figurehead for Italian Freemasons. "[He] famously hated priests and wrote novels in which priests were evil," Dickie says.

When Italy unified in 1860, the new nation claimed much of the Church's land. In retribution, the pope banned Catholics from participating in Italian elections. In the growing conflict between Church and state, Freemasonry enjoyed a surge in membership as a champion of lay values. And Freemasons wanted to send a clear message to the powers that be at the Vatican. The horse and rider originally looked down at the seat of the Catholic Church, but in 1929 the statue was turned around so the horse's rear end faces the home of the Holy See.

"Masonry comes out of the Enlightenment. Freemasons were rebelling against the Protestant and Catholic orthodoxies of the time and taking a romantic view of forbidden knowledge from the past," says Goldwag.

Masonic symbols like the Square and Compasses, letter "G," and beehive can now be found-openly displayed-on gravestones, cornerstones, and monuments around the world. The pervasive symbols are testament to how far those Enlightenment ideas spread.

Fact Check

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Are Freemason Symbols Hiding in Plain Sight? | HISTORY

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Freemasons coopted multiple historical symbols-but are they really secretly embedded in objects and places around the world?

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Hidden messages that promote products in films once caused a moral panic. But is the much-feared technique really effective? The BBC's Phil Tinline helped devise an experiment to find out.

On 12 September, 1957, at a studio in New York, a market researcher in the Mad Men mould called a press conference.

James Vicary astonished the assembled reporters by announcing that he'd repeatedly flashed the slogans "Drink Coca-Cola" and "Eat popcorn" throughout a movie, too fast for conscious perception. As a result, he claimed, sales of popcorn had risen 18.1% - and Coke by 57.7%. This, he declared, was "subliminal advertising".

Vicary thought his fellow Americans would cheer this prospect - annoying cinema and TV ads could now be replaced with his imperceptible flashes. But on both sides of the Atlantic, his announcement sparked fear and outrage. "Welcome," cried one American magazine, "to 1984."

His story took a more serious blow when the manager of the cinema involved told Motion Picture Daily that the experiment had had no impact. In 1962, Vicary finally confessed that he hadn't done enough research to go public and that he regretted the whole thing.

But a nagging anxiety about the supposed power of subliminal advertising has never gone away. Ever since the 1957 panic, it has been banned in the UK. So is all this anything more than a hangover from sci-fi-style Cold War worries about mass brainwashing?

Psychologists have long agreed that flashing words too quickly for the conscious mind to register can have some limited effects in the lab.

And at the University of Utrecht in 2006, a team of experimental social psychologists, Johan Karremans, Jasper Claus and Wolfgang Stroebe, did manage to make subliminal advertising itself work - in strict laboratory conditions, provided a series of limiting factors are in place.

Their work suggested that subliminal advertising was only effective with products that people knew of and somewhat liked. The flashes made the brand name more '"cognitively accessible", their theory went, so it wouldn't work with very high-profile brands - you couldn't make a brand like Coca-Cola much more familiar to people than it already is.

They replicated their results, and published their findings in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

But the crucial question, raised by Vicary's dubious claims, and never finally settled, is this - can you take all this out of the lab, beyond its strict controls, and reproduce it in the messiness of real life, on a mass scale?

No-one, apparently, has attempted this since the 1950s. So, as part of a BBC Radio 4 documentary, we decided to carry out a public test.

Working under the guidance of Stroebe, I devised an experiment in which 98 participants volunteered to take part. Stroebe and his colleagues' research suggested that if you knew subliminal advertising is at work, it was ineffective, so it was only afterwards that what was being tested was revealed.

Also, the Dutch research indicated that advertising a specific drink brand with subliminal flashes was only effective if the audience actually wanted a drink. So it had to be a brand that was perceived as thirst-quenching.

So a pre-test survey was conducted to find a drink brand that might work. As with Stroebe's pre-test, the responses suggested that Lipton Iced Tea fitted the bill.

When the volunteers arrived, they were given crisps in an attempt to make them thirsty. They were sat in a theatre and divided into two groups, half with red blindfolds and half with black.

They were shown the same three-minute clip from the BBC/Kudos drama Spooks twice, but each time one group wore the blindfolds. The clip watched by the group with red blindfolds contained a 10-millisecond flash, every five seconds, of the word "Lipton", using a technique developed by BBC Research and Development

The participants, members of the audience of Radio 4's science show The Infinite Monkey Cage, were then offered a choice of two drinks - Lipton Iced Tea or a brand of mineral water - and asked to complete a questionnaire.

Strikingly, there was no significant effect.

For all participants, a few more people in the test group picked Lipton, but not enough to be statistically significant. When we removed those likely to have been immune to the subliminals - ie those who would have picked Lipton anyway, and those who dislike it and would never pick it, slightly more people in the control group picked Lipton, but this difference was not significant either.

The Test

The test group watched a clip which included subliminal flashes of the word Lipton

The control group watched a clip without any flashes

The participants were then asked whether they wanted to drink Lipton iced tea or mineral water

Test group (all participants): 46% chose Lipton, 54% water

Control group (all participants) 37% Lipton, 63% water

Results refined to exclude those who would definitely have chosen Lipton, or who would definitely not have chosen it

Test group (refined) 53% Lipton, 47% water

Control group (refined) 61% Lipton, 39% water

Experts agreed the differences were not statistically significant

Given that we know this does work in the lab, there are many possible reasons why there wasn't a significant result in the public version.

Despite the crisps, a substantial number of the participants said they weren't thirsty. Maybe people didn't see enough of the flashes. Maybe the clip was too short, or not positive enough. Maybe a brief shot of someone drinking water had a counter-influence. Maybe it would have worked better with another brand. And maybe a larger sample was needed than was possible in the situation.

Or perhaps it was the subliminals themselves. Even if everything else is in place, getting the timing of the flashes right is very tricky.

If they are too fast, they are not even subconsciously perceptible. If they are too slow, some people would notice them - which would be disastrous for any advertiser trying this for real.

The experiment also suggested that stringing subliminals across an entire movie would be very laborious. The clip from Spooks was picked because it is full of fast cuts and moving camerawork. This, Stroebe advised, would help mask the subliminals, making them less consciously detectable.

But over the course of a whole film, the speed and transparency of the subliminals would probably have to be varied widely to make sure the audience didn't spot them. The most viable strategy would be to insert them only in the last few minutes before the end.

So this experiment did not finally disprove the notion that subliminal advertising could theoretically work in public.

But what it did demonstrate is that, while the fear of subliminal advertising may be based on a kernel of scientific truth, in practice this would be a devilishly tricky thing to pull off.

If, after months of preparation, with willing volunteers, with the distribution of crisps to induce thirst, we still couldn't achieve a result, the chances of achieving anything on a mass scale don't appear very attractive.

Furthermore, even if the subliminals had influenced choice immediately after the film, it is very doubtful that there would be a lasting effect on their drink purchases after they left the cinema.

And balance the low chance of success against the catastrophic PR (and legal) risk of getting caught doing this, and you'd have to be a true Mad Man to try it.

More from the Magazine

Can You Spot the Hidden Message? was broadcast on 19 January on BBC Radio 4 at 16:00 GMT - listen to the programme on BBC iPlayer

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Does subliminal advertising actually work?

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Hidden messages that promote products in films once caused a moral panic. But is the much-feared technique really effective? The BBC's Phil Tinline helped devise an experiment to find out. On 12 September, 1957, at a studio in New York, a market researcher in the Mad Men mould called a press conference.

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Just how the Chicago White Sox "Big Fix" of 1919 played out remains a subject of considerable debate among baseball historians. Players involved-dubbed "Black Sox"-were acquitted in court, but banned by the league from continuing to play.

Accounts differ, but the scheme to throw the game for money may have first materialized a few weeks before that year's World Series, when White Sox first baseman C. Arnold "Chick" Gandil and a gambler named Joseph "Sport" Sullivan met to discuss the possibility of Sox players deliberately tanking in the championship. Gamblers had long been greasing the palms of disgruntled, underpaid ballplayers in exchange for inside tips, but attempting to rig an entire World Series was a rare and perhaps even unprecedented proposition.

Gandil later claimed he was initially skeptical that it could work, but he eventually agreed that he and a few co-conspirators would throw the series in exchange for a hefty payout of around $100,000. He soon enlisted White Sox pitchers Eddie Cicotte and Claude "Lefty" Williams, shortstop Charles "Swede" Risberg and outfielder Oscar "Happy" Felsch into the scheme. Third baseman Buck Weaver was in on the early stages of the plot before pulling out, and utility infielder Fred McMullin was cut in after he overheard the players talking about the deal. Power hitter "Shoeless" Joe Jackson was also approached.

White Sox Players Conspire With Crooks

As Gandil recruited conspirators on the team, Sullivan and a tangled web of crooks- that may have included former Sox player "Sleepy" Bill Burns, former Detroit Tiger Bill Maharg and boxer Abe Attell-began raising the bribe money. New York mob leader Arnold Rothstein may have been a major player, but his involvement has never been proven, and evidence suggests that Gandil and his co-conspirators may have hatched multiple deals with different syndicates.

"They not only sold [the series]" Abe Attell later claimed, "but they sold it wherever they could get a buck." Bookies had previously had the Sox winning the World Series over the underdog Cincinnati Reds by as much as three-to-one, but the odds shifted after those in the know began betting heaps of cash on the Reds. As the championship drew near, the streets buzzed with rumors that several White Sox players were in the pocket of high stakes gamblers.

Suspicions that the championship was "in the bag" only increased after the White Sox and the Reds met on October 1 for the first game of what was then a best-of-nine World Series. After hitting a batter with one of his first pitches-supposedly a signal that the fix was on-pitcher Eddie Cicotte went on to make a series of uncharacteristic blunders from the mound. Chicago lost the game 9-1, leading The New York Times to marvel, "Never before in the history of America's biggest baseball spectacle has a pennant-winning club received such a disastrous drubbing in an opening game..." The faulty play continued in game two, when Sox pitcher Lefty Williams gifted the Reds a 4-2 win after walking three batters in a row.

White Sox Players Call Off the Fix-But Still Lose

The White Sox continued losing over the next few games, and by October 6, the series stood at 4-1 in favor the Reds. Everything was proceeding as planned, yet according to later accounts, many of the crooked Sox players had begun to grow restless. They had purportedly arranged to receive their bribes in five $20,000 installments-one after each loss-but the gamblers had failed to deliver the full amount.

After game five, the furious ballplayers supposedly called off the fix and resolved to play to win for the rest of the series. Over the next two games, the Sox sprang to life, winning 5-4 and 4-1 and putting themselves back in the race for the championship. Backing out of a deal with gangsters proved difficult, however, and several of the players later hinted at having received threats against their families. Whether because of intimidation or merely an unexpectedly strong opposition, the Sox went on to lose game eight to the Reds 10-5, giving Cincinnati their first ever World Series win.

The Outcome of the Scandal

Rumors of a fix continued to persist in the months after the championship defeat. Leading the charge was sportswriter Hugh Fullerton, who investigated the 1919 series and later wrote a famous article for the New York Evening World titled "Is Big League Baseball Being Run for Gamblers, With Players in the Deal?" Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey was quick to shrug off any reports of impropriety, saying, "I believe my boys fought the battles of the recent World Series on the level." Despite his claims to the contrary, evidence would later show that Comiskey had been tipped off about a possible fix early in the series and may have attempted to bury the story to protect his business interests.

Baseball's leading figures appeared content to let the 1919 World Series go unexamined, and it largely did until August 31, 1920, when evidence surfaced that gamblers had rigged a regular season game between the Cubs and the Phillies. A grand jury convened to investigate, and speculation soon turned to the previous year's World Series.

Around that same time, gambler Bill Maharg went public with an account of his own involvement in the fix. As the accusations mounted, Eddie Cicotte decided to testify before the grand jury. During a tearful mea culpa, the pitcher admitted involvement in the scandal, saying, "I don't know why I did it...I needed the money. I had the wife and kids." Shortly afterward, star hitter "Shoeless" Joe Jackson testified and admitted to having accepted $5,000 from his teammates. Over the next few days, Lefty Williams and Oscar Felsch also confessed their involvement.

In October 1920, Gandil, Cicotte, Williams, Risberg, Felsch, McMullin, Weaver and Jackson-now dubbed the "Black Sox"-were indicted on nine counts of conspiracy. While they were lambasted in the media for "selling out baseball," the players coasted through their June 1921 trial after all the paper records relating to their grand jury confessions vanished under mysterious circumstances. Many now believe that Comiskey and gambling kingpin Arnold Rothstein arranged for the papers to be stolen as part of a cover-up. Whatever the cause, the prosecution's case disappeared along with the confessions. On August 2, 1921, the Black Sox were found not guilty on all counts.

Baseball's First Commissioner Bans the Players for Life

The ballplayers' vindication would not last long. Only a day after the acquittal, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, recently appointed as baseball's first commissioner, decreed that all eight players were permanently banned from organized baseball. "Regardless of the verdict of juries," Landis wrote, "no player who throws a ballgame, no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ballgame, no player that sits in conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing a game are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball."

The edict effectively destroyed the careers of the eight Black Sox. Some of them later tried to win reinstatement to the league, but Commissioner Landis ensured that none of the disgraced ballplayers ever set foot on a big-league diamond again. The decision was especially harsh toward Buck Weaver, who was banned even though he supposedly dropped out of the plot before it started. Joe Jackson, meanwhile, had admitted to accepting money from the Black Sox, but later claimed that he was an unwilling participant and had tried to tip Comiskey to the scheme. "Shoeless Joe's" true level of involvement remains unclear, but his series-best batting average of .375 suggests he took no active role in throwing the 1919 championship.

If Landis' blanket ban helped cleanse baseball's damaged image, it also served to sweep the Black Sox scandal under the rug. Chick Gandil and others would later produce contradictory accounts of what happened, leading to still unanswered questions about who was really involved in the 1919 World Series fix and to what degree the games were thrown. Arnold Rothstein, one of the most likely suspects for organizing or financing the fix, was never even charged with a crime. He would maintain his innocence for the rest of his life, despite widespread rumors that he made a fortune betting on the series.

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What Was the 1919 'Black Sox' Baseball Scandal? | HISTORY

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In 1919, Chicago White Sox players allegedly threw the World Series. It remains one of professional baseball's most notorious scandals.

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(Copyright: SPL)

Fears that the world will end on 21 December are rife, despite there being no evidence. So, why are we so fixated with end of the world theories?

I have bad news. The world is going to end. But I also have good news. Probably not anytime soon.

It's only a very recent, very wrong and arguably very wilful misinterpretation of the ancient Mayan calendar to conclude it ends on 21 December 2012. And that even if their "long count" does stop then, there's no more reason to think it will immediately lead to a planet-wide liquidation sale than if your desk calendar reaches the end of the year before you've bought a new one.

Even Nasa - who ought to have plenty on their hands looking for traces of life on Mars - have weighed in to apply logical to the eschatological by publishing Beyond 2012: Why the World Won't End. There's no need to recap here on the details of their argument - suffice to say that after reading it only the most hardcore conspiracy nut would still have worries about an upcoming end of everything. The more interesting question - at least for me - is why so many, so often, are drawn to these tales of impending destruction? Why do we seem to want it to be the end of days, and to have the apocalypse, now?

The doom-mongers are only around to - probably - be wrong about the world ending on 21 December this year, because they'd already been wrong about it ending in 2003, when the entirely fictional planet Nibiru was first supposed to collide with us. And wrong about it ending on 31 December 1999 simply because of an arbitrary change of date that wasn't even the end of the millennium. And wrong about it ending on at least six other dates in the 1990s. And also wrong about it ending at least two or three times every single decade until at least the 1840s, with evidence of scores of other more sporadic global false alarms stretching right back to ancient Rome.

Not that I'm suggesting it's the same spread-betting catastrophists backing all of these options - although there are some groups and people like the Bible Student Movement and US Christian broadcaster Harold Camping who have come up with multiple off-beam predictions. But collectively it means that at any given time there is always a supposed terminal cataclysm just around the corner, causing distress to the gullible and vulnerable.

Just in case anyone is thinking that won't be the case once we make it past 21 December , there are already apocalyptic predictions about various subsequent dates. My favourite is the one best summed up in the London Evening Standard headline, "The world will end in 2060, according to Newton". Now it's true that besides being one of the greatest scientific geniuses, Sir Isaac did have some odd beliefs. But the world ending in 2060 isn't one of them. The "prediction" derives from a letter he wrote in 1704 "to put a stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men who are frequently predicting the time of the end" - even back then this nonsense was clearly common. In it Newton says he can't see any reason why the world would end before 2060, "it may end later, but I see no reason for its ending sooner", and explicitly states "this I mention not to assert when the time of the end shall be". Despite being so clear he's writing on a not-for-prophet basis, type "Newton end of the world" into Google and you'll get over 50 million hits.

Why are we so determined to think our days are numbered, and so willing to bend the facts to fit our delusions? For once, I don't think this is the fault of movies and other fictions. Yes, from sci-fi to Cold War thrillers to most James Bond outings there are countless films and books in which humanity and/or the world is nearly, partly or completely obliterated. With potential sources of devastation ranging from interplanetary impacts to unstoppable pandemics, natural mega-disasters to unnatural alien invasions, global war to individual mad geniuses, there are almost endless endgame possibilities and lots of CGI fun to be had wreaking big screen havoc. Including of course the Mayan-calendar referencing 2012 with its deliriously daft line, "the neutrinos...have mutated".

After seeing or reading such tall tales does anyone watch the skies more carefully for hostile UFOs, or in any way worry more that the end is nigh? I doubt it. If anything the best of them leave you feeling a bit more alive. My wholly unscientific theory - and I've no more evidence for it than the Maya-Maya-world's-on-fire lot do for their beliefs - is this stems from our understandable difficulty grasping the walk-on part we all have amid the sprawling enormity of deep time. It is not easy to get our heads round the Earth having existed for billions of years, probably existing for millions if not billions more, and our own life in comparison - however long and fruitful - being an almost infinitesimally insignificant instant in the middle of it all. So fleeting and so far from either end of the story that many of us behave like individual black holes, mentally warping time to write ourselves into the grand finale.

A Reuters poll earlier this year found that nearly one in four Americans and one in seven worldwide believe the world will end during their lifetime. In the UK the figure was less than one in 12. That's a lot of people who don't just think the world revolves around them, they think it stops around them too.

Sooner or later - and my money is on much later - those who are convinced of our imminent doom will inevitably be proved right. The planet can't last forever - astronomers predict the planet only has around another 7.5bn years until it is engulfed by the Sun and humans will likely have disappeared much earlier. So, in the long, long meantime, if we do only have only the briefest cameo in a seemingly interminable epic, shouldn't we make the most of it while we are on stage?

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Our never ending obsession with the apocalypse

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Fears that the world will end on 21 December are rife, despite there being no evidence. So, why are we so fixated with end of the world theories?

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On February 28, 1995, the Denver International Airport (DIA) opened its doors and its runways to the public after falling over a year behind schedule and spending a reported $2 billion more than its original budget had dictated.

The massive new airport didn't just take up lots of time and money-it also took up a lot of space: More than two decades later, it's still the largest airport in the United States by area (53 square miles) with the longest commercial use runway available in the country (runway 16R/34L is 16,000 feet long-approximately three miles). DIA replaced Denver's old Stapleton International Airport, which was plagued by problems (runways too close together, a general lack of space for necessary expansion), and its creation helped meet some basic needs that Stapleton simply couldn't. Denver needed more room to serve the various airlines that had made-and wanted to make-the Mile High City a hub of operations, and DIA did just that.

That all sounds normal enough, right? A city needed a new airport, and it got one, even though it took a lot more money and time than originally planned, as so often happens with large-scale public works (although there is some debate as to who actually funded the airport, but we'll get to that). But people have wondered if DIA-giant, expensive, strange DIA-is home to something far more sinister ... like a conspiracy. Or a lot of conspiracies.

Although one of the underlying themes of the various conspiracy theories regarding DIA holds that Stapleton was a fine airport and didn't need to be replaced, there is one inarguable point: the runways at Stapleton were not smartly laid out. The parallel runways were too close together for safe landings in bad weather, which happened around 150 days a year and cut the number of arrivals an hour from 80 to 36. DIA doesn't have the same problem, but it does have something far more nefarious: a shape that many people have noticed looks curiously like a swastika, at least from the air. Taken on its own, such a shape could be brushed off as being just a really terrible piece of planning, but combined with everything else, it all looks very odd indeed.

Leo Tanguma's two murals, which take up wide swathes of wallspace in DIA's baggage claim, might have some nice names-they are called "Children of the World Dream of Peace" and "In Peace and Harmony with Nature"-but their actual content is terrifying. Death-masked soldiers with guns stalk children, animals are dead and kept under glass, and the entire world looks to have been destroyed. As if being at the airport isn't bad enough.

Some believe the murals at Denver's airport feature doomsday scenes. It doesn't help that an inlay on the floor features the letters "Au" and "Ag." Though this nod to gold and silver is appropriate-Colorado does have a rich mining history, after all-some believe the letters represent a dangerous strain of hepatitis that could serve as a biological weapon. Those two symbols, coupled with the unnerving mural, have fueled a conspiracy theory that the airport could be a hub for biological warfare.

To his credit, the narrative of Tanguma's murals ends on a happy note-with all that peace and harmony stuff-and the artist himself has said, "I have children sleeping amid the debris of war and this warmonger is killing the dove of peace, but the kids are dreaming of something better in the future and their little dream goes behind the general and continues behind this group of people, and the kids are dreaming that [peace] will happen someday. See how the little dream becomes something really beautiful, that someday the nations of the world will abandon war and come together." Still, the last place anyone wants to see depictions of death and destruction in an airport.
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There is one very weird marker that's hard to ignore: a dedication marker and capstone that's been placed over a time capsule (which supposedly includes a credit card, Colorado flag, and DIA opening day newspapers, among many other things) that is set to be opened in 2094. The symbols on the marker are associated with the Freemasons, a charitable organization that is often subject to their own conspiracy theories. The marker also mentions the " New World Airport Commission," an organization that doesn't actually exist (or does it? Our brains are spinning!) but appears to be taking credit for building the entire airport. However, the contributors listed as part of the so-called NWAC, including an architecture firm and a metal company, do exist. And they just make buildings and metals. Well, probably.

The airport is home to a number of tunnels, including a tram that goes between concourses and a failed automated baggage system. That all sounds normal enough, but there is definitely something weird about that automated baggage system-mainly, that it cost a lot of money and then never actually worked. The system, which failed pretty spectacularly when it was first tested and just never got better, was one of the reasons for DIA's delayed opening. By 2005, most of the airport's concourses had abandoned it totally, making both its bloated price and long delays feel like even more of a failure-or at least a really weird way to cover up the building of tunnels.

But where do the tunnels go? Perhaps to some kind of underground bunker? Most of the people who believe in the various conspiracy theories regarding DIA seem to think that the airport is actually the headquarters for something far nastier than just an airport-like the New World Order or our own American government. This idea might sound pretty wild-but there is something very strange to back it up: buried buildings.

As the story goes, when DIA was first being built, five massive buildings were built somehow incorrectly. Instead of being blown up or otherwise dismantled, they were buried. Although theorists say that a construction worker ultimately blew the whistle on this very weird practice, finding his original testimony on the subject is almost impossible.

It's hard to deny the weirdness of DIA's unofficial mascot. The massive horse statue, called " Mustang"-and dubbed "Blucifer"- has already killed at least one man. At 32 feet tall and 9000 pounds (it's made out of fiberglass), "Mustang" is huge and imposing, and its glowing red eyes don't help matters. This thing is giant and really scary-and it killed the man who made it. Really. Artist Luis Jimenez died in 2006 when a piece of the sculpture's head broke off and severed an artery in his leg. His children finished the horse. Some believe the horse is cursed, and that its glowing eyes represent the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (they're actually a nod to Jimenez's father, who had a shop that sold neon lights).
A version of this story originally ran in 2016; it has been updated for 2021.

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6 Strange Conspiracy Theories Surrounding the Denver Airport

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From biological warfare to underground bunkers to "Blucifer" the horse, Denver's airport has generated a lot of mysterious buzz.

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On 14th April 1865, the audience at Ford's Theatre in Washington DC settled into their seats to watch a performance of Our American Cousin. What would unfold in front of them would be one of the most infamous moments in the history of the United States of America.

While the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on that Good Friday is a widely known event, it was surrounded by weird coincidences, rumours, and serendipities that, to this day, have people questioning whether there were larger forces at work in the theatre that night. Here are six curious coincidences surrounding the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Grant's conspiracy

Ulysses S. Grant and his wife, Julia, were both due to be sat with Lincoln at Ford's Theatre. However, last-minute changes saw the Grants change their plans and visit New York instead. The suspicious timing led to a conspiracy that Grant was involved in the assassination plot. Under scrutiny as to his the plans changed at the last minute, it turned out that Grant was likely saved by his wife falling out with the First Lady, Mary Todd Lincoln.

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Julia witnessed Mary Todd lose her temper whilst visiting the Lincolns with General Edward Ord. After seeing the general's wife, Sally Ord, ride alongside Abraham, Mary, in a jealous rage, chastised Sally. When Julia spoke up in defence of Sally, Mary then turned her anger at Julia. So, unimpressed by the First Lady, Ulysses and Julia opted to miss the theatre and visit their children instead.

Suspicious absences

Grant's absence that night wasn't the only cause for conspiracy. Lincoln's bodyguard, John Parker, should have been stationed behind the curtain throughout the performance, but was nowhere to be found.

While it's bizarre to think of only one person protecting the President of the United States today, it wasn't uncommon in 1865. Lincoln was surprisingly unconcerned with his safety, despite the constant threats to his life. He would often opt for smaller security details and could sometimes be found walking alone late at night in Washington.

John Parker, meanwhile, was not the type of police officer you would expect to have been put on guard duty. Frequently disciplined for drunken behaviour, visiting brothels, and conduct unbecoming of a police officer, it's unsurprising that when Lincoln was assassinated, Parker was found drinking in a nearby tavern having abandoned his post.

Et tu, Brute?

While John Wilkes Booth is now best known as the assassin of President Lincoln, he wasn't a faceless nobody before that night. Both John and his brother Edwin were born into a family of actors and each became thespians themselves. However, while Edwin was renowned for his acting ability and kind and gentle personality, John was a belligerent and temperamental actor. Considered average at best, John was less popular than his brother and had a bigger reputation for his taciturn nature and alcoholism than for his on-stage performances.

Just six months before the assassination, the brothers performed together in Shakespeare's Julius Ceaser, a play that notably ends in the betrayal and assassination of Rome's most famous emperor.

Booth's heroics

Just a few short years before the assassination, there had been another fateful life-or-death situation involving a Booth and a Lincoln. While waiting to board a crowded train, Abraham's son, Robert, was knocked by the crowd between the train and the platform. The train had already begun to move. Before he had time to realise what was happening, Robert was gripped by a hand that lifted him back onto the platform.

Upon turning around, he realised that he had been saved by the popular actor, Edwin Booth. Edwin did not know who he had saved until a while later when Robert recounted the story to Colonel Adam Badeau, who reached out to Edwin to congratulate him on his heroics.

The mad hatter

Despite severely injuring his leg when jumping from the balcony onto the stage, Booth was still able to escape the theatre that night. Hiding in a barn in Virginia, Booth had little better to do with his 12 days on the run than write about the motivations behind his plot to first kidnap and then assassinate the president.

When Booth's whereabouts were discovered, the Sixteenth New York Cavalry unit was dispatched to bring him in. Early in the morning, the unit surrounded Booth's hideout and set it alight with the intention of flushing Booth and his accomplice out. However, when peeking through a gap in the barn's wall, Sergeant Boston Corbett panicked. Convinced that Booth was going to discharge his rifle and escape, Corbett shot Booth first. His shot went straight through Booth's neck, paralysing him. Booth didn't die instantly, however, and would suffer for several hours, begging his captors to kill him.

While Corbett was revered in the north as a hero, his actions that day were questioned heavily. He was already notable for his unstable behaviour, which is attributed to his regular handling of mercury when working as a hat maker. A religious fanatic, Corbett had castrated himself at the age of 26 to avoid sexual temptation. Following Booth's death, his mental health would continue to deteriorate. He became aggressive and paranoid and feared retribution from Booth's compatriots.

After holding members of the Kansas State legislature at gunpoint, Corbett was declared legally insane and institutionalised. Corbett later escaped and seemingly disappeared from history.

Cursed company

Corbett wasn't the only player in the story of the assassination of Lincoln to be declared insane. In fact, of the four individuals in the theatre's balcony box that fateful night, half would be institutionalised, and the other half murdered.

Following Grant's change of plans, the Lincolns struggled to find company to join them. Eventually, the invitation was accepted by Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancé Clara.

After Lincoln was shot, Rathbone jumped up to apprehend the assassin before he could escape. As a result, Rathbone was stabbed by Booth. The injury, which had cut through to the bone, bled profusely. However, with everyone at the time attending to the president, Rathbone wasn't treated until much later.

Despite healing from his physical wounds, Rathbone was severely disturbed by the events of that night and the fact that he was unable to protect the president. He went on to marry Clara and father three children with her, but his mental health failed to improve. One night he threatened to hurt his children and attacked Clara. He fatally shot and stabbed her, before trying to stab himself to death. As before, though, Rathbone survived his knife wounds and was declared insane. He was sent to live at an asylum for the rest of his life.

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The curious coincidences of Abraham Lincoln's assassination

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Lincoln's assassination was surrounded by weird coincidences and rumours that have people questioning whether there were larger forces at work in the theatre that night.

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Of all the examples in Egypt, the most famous is the Great Pyramid of Giza, built over several decades in the 26th century BC on the command of pharaoh Khufu. It was the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and the only one still surviving, and for nearly 4,000 years it stood as the tallest human-made structure in the world.

The conspiracy theory: an alien construction

So the theory has it, the pyramids were not the result of decades-long construction projects involving tens of thousands of people, gigantic logistical and administrative efforts, near-inexhaustible supplies of stone, and master architects and engineers. Instead, they were built by aliens, or at least aliens showed humans how to build them.

Extra-terrestrial interference has not been the only outlandish theory to explain how an ancient civilisation boasted such awesome monuments. The people of Atlantis have received similar credit. Much about the pyramids, from how they were made to what is inside them, remains unknown to this day, so perhaps unsurprisingly there are many misconceptions as well as conspiracy theories.

More like this

A common claim that still lingers is that they were built by slaves. " The Bible suggests that the Egyptians enslaved the Israelites, and classical authors visiting Egypt recorded that slaves must have been used. But if you came from a civilisation that used slaves, like Greece or Rome, you're probably going to assume any massive monument was built by slaves," says Joyce Tyldesley, Egyptologist at the University of Manchester. "While there certainly was what could be called forced labour, it is incorrect to imagine slaves being whipped and dragged from other countries. They were native Egyptians rather than prisoners."

What is the source of the theory?

Although pyramids have existed for more than four millennia - and across many civilisations around the world - the introduction of aliens was a fairly recent idea. "I would say it really develops after HG Wells publishes The War of the Worlds in 1897. This starts a run of sci-fi books," says Professor Tyldesley.

"There's one in particular in 1898, Edison's Conquest of Mars [by American astronomer and writer Garrett P Serviss], which reveals that the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx are Martian constructions. It's not supposed to be a serious book; it's fiction. But this idea that someone from outside Earth might have visited Egypt and built the pyramids took hold."

In 1968, the Swiss author Erich von Däniken published his bestselling book, Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past, which went a long way in popularising the theory that ancient astronauts visited Earth, were welcomed as gods, and greatly influenced the cultures, religions, technologies and, of course, architecture of ancient civilisations.

The reasons why the theory took hold

There is a compelling argument that the belief in ancient aliens visiting Earth and imparting their superior knowledge stemmed, initially at least, from a deep-rooted racism and prejudice against people from the past, a reluctance or refusal to believe that an ancient civilisation from somewhere else in the world - like Africa or, in the case of the Mesoamerican pyramids, Central America - could actually construct such impressive monuments. Any explanation, even aliens, would be preferable or more believable.

"It's not appreciating the skills and abilities of the people of the past because we have sufficient evidence to show that these people could do this type of building," says Professor Tyldesley. "But I think there's more to it than that. Prior to the idea of aliens helping to build the pyramids, we had the idea that people from Atlantis might have helped, and prior to that we had the idea that God inspired the builders."

The long succession of changing and evolving theories may be a result of the longevity of the pyramids themselves: they are still there, inspiring wonder and bewilderment. "The fact that we didn't understand the Egyptian beliefs of death and the afterlife for a long time after the end of the dynastic age meant that we were forced to find explanations to try and understand why they were there."

The evidence that debunks the conspiracy

"If we take the Great Pyramid of Giza, we know that it was built by gangs of workers summoned under a sort of national service or corvée system," says Professor Tyldesley. "They had fairly basic but effective tools, and the workers were able to cut blocks of stone, transport them to the construction site and gradually erect the pyramid. "There are parts of the technology we can't see today - for example, the ramps - but basically, it was the sheer amount of person power that made it all possible."

The existence of a limestone quarry near to the site of the Great Pyramid, plus evidence of the camp sites for the workers, reveals how extensive the project would have been. "We have evidence of how they were fed and for the cemeteries where they were buried," adds Professor Tyldesley. But it is only in the past 50 to 70 years that our understanding of pyramid building has made significant strides, which for a long time left a vacuum in which conspiracy theories were able to take root. Egyptologists, archaeologists and historians could do more, according to Professor Tyldesley, to present the evidence and a credible alternative to the idea of alien visitors.

"The construction of the pyramids encouraged not only building techniques, it encouraged civil service to develop to coordinate all the workers; the development of boats to ship timber or stone; medical skills to deal with accidents; and possibly increased the sense of community. I think the building of the pyramids is absolutely fundamental to the building of Egypt."
Writer and broadcaster Dr Joyce Tyldesley is honorary research fellow at the School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology at Liverpool University, and teaches Egyptology at Manchester University

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Were the pyramids built by aliens? The real history that debunks the conspiracy

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Are the pyramids too awesome to have been the work of the mere mortals of ancient Egypt?

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The origins of one of America's oldest unsolved mysteries can be traced to August 1587, when a group of about 115 English settlers arrived on Roanoke Island, off the coast of what is now North Carolina. Following an earlier, failed attempt at settlement on Roanoke two years earlier, these colonists intended to form the first permanent English outpost in the New World.

John White's Departure and the Spanish Armada

Later that year, it was decided that John White, governor of the new colony, would sail back to England in order to gather a fresh load of supplies. But just as he arrived, a major naval war broke out between England and Spain, and Queen Elizabeth I called on every available ship to confront the mighty Spanish Armada.

In August 1590, White finally returned to Roanoke, where he had left his wife and daughter, his infant granddaughter (Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the Americas) and the other settlers three long years before. He found no trace of the colony or its inhabitants, and few clues to what might have happened, apart from a single word-"Croatoan"-carved into a wooden post.

Was the 'Lost Colony' of Roanoke Ever Found?

Investigations into the fate of the "Lost Colony" of Roanoke have continued over the centuries, but no one has come up with a satisfactory answer. "Croatoan" was the name of an island south of Roanoke that was home to a Native American tribe of the same name. Perhaps, then, the colonists were killed or abducted by Native Americans.

Other hypotheses hold that they tried to sail back to England on their own and got lost at sea, that they met a bloody end at the hands of Spaniards who had marched up from Florida or that they moved further inland and were absorbed into a friendly tribe.

In 2007, efforts began to collect and analyze DNA from local families to figure out if they're related to the Roanoke settlers, local Native American tribes or both. Despite the lingering mystery, it seems there's one thing to be thankful for: The lessons learned at Roanoke may have helped the next group of English settlers, who would found their own colony 17 years later just a short distance to the north, at Jamestown.

HISTORY Vault: Roanoke: A Mystery Carved in Stone

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What Happened to the 'Lost Colony' of Roanoke? | HISTORY

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Sixty years ago this fall, Bigfoot first stepped into the public consciousness. "Giant footprints puzzle residents," a headline in the Humboldt Times announced. The small Northern California newspaper reported that a road construction crew had discovered humanlike footprints that were a massive 16 inches long. The paper was the first to give the mysterious animal that made the prints its memorable moniker-"Bigfoot"-and the creature has been stomping through the American imagination ever since.

Today, the legendary beast seems to be everywhere: You will find Bigfoot looking awfully cute this year in two children's films: The Son of Bigfoot and Smallfoot. Animal Planet recently aired the finale of its popular series "Finding Bigfoot," which lasted 11 seasons despite never making good on the promise of its title. And the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization lists at least one report from every state, except Hawaii, over the past two decades. The most recent sighting, in June 2018, was by a woman in Florida who reported a creature that looked like "a large pile of soggy grass." Other evidence in the database includes supposed Bigfoot scat, nests and noises. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, it may not make a sound-but it seems someone will report that a Bigfoot knocked it over.

"Interest in the existence of the creature is at an all-time high," the paleontologist Darren Naish has observed, even though "there's nothing even close to compelling as goes the evidence."

Of course, Bigfoot is not the first fabled hominid to roam North America. Sasquatches long populated the mythologies of American Indian tribes in the Pacific Northwest, but those 1958 footprints transformed the myth into a media sensation. The tracks were planted near Bluff Creek in Northern California by a man named Ray Wallace-but his prank was not revealed until his death in 2002, when his children said it had all been "just a joke."

By that point, more important evidence had entered the Bigfoot file. In 1967, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin filmed a few seconds of a hairy creature walking on two legs by the same Bluff Creek-the most famous and contested piece of Bigfoot "evidence" to this day. That the Patterson-Gimlin film was created in the same place that Wallace had staged his hoax is just one reason to doubt its authenticity. Skeptics say the animal was a man in costume, while believers argue that the creature's movements and body proportions cannot possibly have been human. The debate has been raging for half a century, which raises a question of its own. "How is it that the evidence has not gotten any better despite the exponential increase in the quantity and quality of cameras?" asks Benjamin Radford, a research fellow with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

Still the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence either. Wild animals don't exactly mug for photos, and the planet's ever-shrinking forests still regularly unpack surprises, such as the saola, an untamed cousin of the cow that was discovered by scientists in Vietnam in 1992. But the saola did not have legions of amateurs hunting it with cameras. With or without hard evidence, many people clearly want to believe in Bigfoot. Which suggests we are dealing more with human imagination than human evolution.

Naish has written that Bigfoot is the modern American "manifestation of a human-wide cultural concept, not a zoological reality." It has much in common with the Australian yowie and the Himalayan yeti: an upright posture, shaggy hair and, of course, large feet. As so-called wild men, they hold a crude mirror up to our own species: What might Homo sapiens be like if civilization had not removed it from nature?

Fact or Folklore
Can you tell the real animals from the fake ones? Hover over each animal to reveal if it is fact or folklore. (Illustration by Iris Gottlieb) Illustrations by Iris Gottlieb
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Some people see these cryptohominids as symbols of pure freedom, living by instinct and foiling every effort to pin them down. To search for Bigfoot in the forest is to taste that freedom. On the trail, you become extra-attuned to nature: the smell of scat, the sounds of breaking branches, the curious impressions in the dirt. As long as there are wild places in America, Bigfoot remains a possibility that, to its most ardent proponents, cannot be disproved.

The hunt for Bigfoot emulates an earlier mode of discovery, when new knowledge was not the product of advanced degrees and expensive machinery but rather curiosity, bravery, patience and survival. In the 19th century, the American landscape revealed its majesties to ordinary settlers pushing westward into territory unmapped by Europeans. To track Bigfoot today is to channel that frontier spirit (as well as to appropriate Native American traditions).

Bigfoot also embodies other less romantic but no less enduring American traits, like gullibility and a hunger for attention. "There are so many fake videos," says Loren Coleman, the founder of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine. The problem has grown worse with social media, where viral hoaxes, like drone footage of a supposed Bigfoot in a clearing in Idaho, can rack up millions of views. Coleman, for his part, believes there is evidence for Bigfoot's existence, but he and his like-minded peers find it difficult to focus attention on this material amid the growing number of obvious shams. "Technology has ruined the old cryptozoology," Coleman says.

His complaint echoes concerns in more mainstream American life, where technologies that promised to build consensus have, in fact, made the truth more difficult than ever to discern. On the internet, Bigfoot has found a habitat much more hospitable than North American forests. It turns out that Bigfoot does not need to exist in order to live forever.

The Iceman Cameth
The amazing story of the infamous frozen "missing link" from Minnesota-and the dogged scientist hot on its trail.

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Why Do So Many People Still Want to Believe in Bigfoot?

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The appeal of the mythical, wild man holds strong

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Loch Ness monster, large marine creature believed by some people to inhabit Loch Ness, Scotland. However, much of the alleged evidence supporting its existence has been discredited, and it is widely thought that the monster is a myth.

Reports of a monster inhabiting Loch Ness date back to ancient times. Notably, local stone carvings by the Pict depict a mysterious beast with flippers. The first written account appears in a 7th-century biography of St. Columba. According to that work, in 565 ad the monster bit a swimmer and was prepared to attack another man when Columba intervened, ordering the beast to "go back." It obeyed, and over the centuries only occasional sightings were reported. Many of these alleged encounters seemed inspired by Scottish folklore, which abounds with mythical water creatures.

In 1933 the Loch Ness monster's legend began to grow. At the time, a road adjacent to Loch Ness was finished, offering an unobstructed view of the lake. In April a couple saw an enormous animal-which they compared to a "dragon or prehistoric monster"-and after it crossed their car's path, it disappeared into the water. The incident was reported in a Scottish newspaper, and numerous sightings followed. In December 1933 the commissioned Marmaduke Wetherell, a big-game hunter, to locate the sea serpent. Along the lake's shores, he found large footprints that he believed belonged to "a very powerful soft-footed animal about 20 feet [6 metres] long." However, upon closer inspection, zoologists at the Natural History Museum determined that the tracks were identical and made with an umbrella stand or ashtray that had a hippopotamus leg as a base; Wetherell's role in the hoax was unclear.

The news only seemed to spur efforts to prove the monster's existence. In 1934 English physician Robert Kenneth Wilson photographed the alleged creature. The iconic image-known as the "surgeon's photograph"-appeared to show the monster's small head and neck. The Daily Mail printed the photograph, sparking an international sensation. Many speculated that the creature was a plesiosaur, a marine reptile that went extinct some 65.5 million years ago.

The Loch Ness area attracted numerous monster hunters. Over the years, several sonar explorations (notably in 1987 and 2003) were undertaken to locate the creature, but none were successful. In addition, numerous photographs allegedly showed the beast, but most were discredited as fakes or as depicting other animals or objects. Notably, in 1994 it was revealed that Wilson's photograph was a hoax spearheaded by a revenge-seeking Wetherell; the "monster" was actually a plastic-and-wooden head attached to a toy submarine. In 2018 researchers conducted a DNA survey of Loch Ness to determine what organisms live in the waters. No signs of a plesiosaur or other such large animal were found, though the results indicated the presence of numerous eels. This finding left open the possibility that the monster is an oversized eel. Despite the lack of conclusive evidence, the Loch Ness monster remained popular-and profitable. In the early 21st century it was thought that it contributed nearly $80 million annually to Scotland's economy.

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Loch Ness monster | History, Sightings, & Facts

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Loch Ness monster, large marine creature believed by some people to inhabit Loch Ness, Scotland. However, much of the alleged evidence supporting its existence has been discredited, and it is widely thought that the monster is a myth. Learn more about the Loch Ness monster.

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Vampires: Real Origins, Legends & Stories | HISTORY

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Vampires are mythological beings who roam the world at night searching for people whose blood they feed upon.

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In the 1940s and 50s reports of "flying saucers" became an American cultural phenomena. Sightings of strange objects in the sky became the raw materials for Hollywood to present visions of potential threats. Posters for films, like Earth vs. the Flying Saucers from 1956 illustrate these fears. Connected to ongoing ideas about life on the Moon, the canals on Mars, and ideas about Martian Civilizations, flying saucers have come to represent the hopes and fears of the modern world.

Are these alleged visitors from other worlds peaceful and benevolent or would they attack and destroy humanity? The destructive power of the Atomic bomb called into question the progressive potential of technology. Fear of the possibilities for destruction in the Cold War-era proved fertile ground for terrestrial anxieties to manifest visions of flying saucers and visitors from other worlds who might be hidden among us in plain sight.

Aliens Among us and Fears of the Other

If UFOs were visiting our world, where were these extraterrestrials? Could they be hidden among us? Comic books and television illustrates how the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors reflected anxieties of that era.

The 1962 comic There are Martians Among Us, from Amazing Fantasy #15, illustrates the way fear of extraterrestrials could reflect Cold War anxieties. In the comic, a search party gathers around a landed alien craft, but it can find no sign of alien beings. Radio announcers warn those nearby to stay indoors. The action shifts to a husband and wife as he prepares to leave their home despite a television announcer's warning to remain indoors. As he waves goodbye he reminds his wife to stay inside. The wife however decides to slip out to the store and is attacked and dragged off. The husband returns home and finding it empty runs towards the telephone in a panic. In a twist, the anxious husband reveals that he and his wife are the Martians.

The fear that there might be alien enemies in our midst resonates with fears of Soviets and communists from the McCarthy era. Ultimately, in this story, the humans are the ones who accost and capture the alien woman. The shift in perspective puts the humans in the position of the monsters.

UFOs as Contemporary Folklore

Aside from depictions of UFOs in media, UFOs are also part of American folk culture. Ideas of aliens and flying saucers are a part of the mythology of America. You can find documentation of these kinds of experiences in folk life collections. An interview with Howard Miller about hunting and hound dogs, collected as part of Tending the Commons: Folklife and Landscape in Southern West Virginia collection, documents an individual's experience with a potential UFO sighting.

In A mysterious light, a segment of an ethnographic interview, Miller describes a strange light he saw once while hunting with his dogs in 1966 "All at once it was daylight, and I looked up to see what happened. There was a light about that big, going up, drifting up the hill. When I looked and seen it just faded out. I've been in the Marines, and know what airplane lights look like, and it was too big for that." When asked if he knew what it was he offered, "I don't know what it was" but went on to explain, "If there is any such thing as a UFO that's what that was." This unexplained light on a walk in the woods is typical of many stories of these kinds of encounters. It's not only the media that tells stories and represents these kinds of ideas, documentation of the experiences and stories Americans tell each other is similarly important for understanding and interpreting what UFOs meant to 20th century America.

Skepticism of UFOs and Alien Encounters

Scientists and astronomers express varying degrees of enthusiasm for the possibility of intelligent life in the universe. However, scientists generally dismiss the idea that there are aliens visiting Earth. In Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Carl Sagan reviews the possibilities of alien visitors to Earth, and suggests that there is good reason to be skeptical of them. Much of Sagan's work focuses on debunking folk stories and beliefs and tries to encourage more rigorous and skeptical thought. He similarly discussed criticism of beliefs in alien visitors in his earlier book, Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.

This zealous criticism of belief in UFOs from Sagan, who was well known for his speculative ideas about the likelihood of alien civilizations, might seem to be a contradiction. Sagan himself had even speculated on the possibilities of visits by ancient aliens in his essay from the early 60s Direct Contact among Galactic Civilizations by Relativistic Interstellar Spaceflight.

How do we reconcile Sagan the skeptic with the imaginative Sagan? Far from a contradiction, these two parts of Sagan's perspective offer a framework for understanding him and the interchange between science and myth about life on other worlds. Skepticism and speculative imagination come together as two halves of the whole. It's essential to entertain and explore new ideas, however strange, while at the same time testing and evaluating the validity of those ideas.

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UFOs and Aliens Among Us | Life on Other Worlds | Articles and Essays | Finding Our Place in the Cosmos: From Galileo to Sagan and Beyond | Digital Collections | Library of Congress

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In the 1940s and 50s reports of "flying saucers" became an American cultural phenomena. Sightings of strange objects in the sky became the raw materials for Hollywood to present visions of potential threats. Posters for films, like Earth vs. the Flying Saucers from 1956 illustrate these fears.

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Table of Contents

1. Legend of the Bermuda Triangle

2. Bermuda Triangle Theories and Counter-Theories

The Bermuda Triangle is a mythical section of the Atlantic Ocean roughly bounded by Miami, Bermuda and Puerto Rico where dozens of ships and airplanes have disappeared. Unexplained circumstances surround some of these accidents, including one in which the pilots of a squadron of U.S. Navy bombers became disoriented while flying over the area; the planes were never found. Other boats and planes have seemingly vanished from the area in good weather without even radioing distress messages. But although myriad fanciful theories have been proposed regarding the Bermuda Triangle, none of them prove that mysterious disappearances occur more frequently there than in other well-traveled sections of the ocean. In fact, people navigate the area every day without incident.

Legend of the Bermuda Triangle

The area referred to as the Bermuda Triangle, or Devil's Triangle, covers about 500,000 square miles of ocean off the southeastern tip of Florida. When Christopher Columbus sailed through the area on his first voyage to the New World, he reported that a great flame of fire (probably a meteor) crashed into the sea one night and that a strange light appeared in the distance a few weeks later. He also wrote about erratic compass readings, perhaps because at that time a sliver of the Bermuda Triangle was one of the few places on Earth where true north and magnetic north lined up.

Did you know? After gaining widespread fame as the first person to sail solo around the globe, Joshua Slocum disappeared on a 1909 voyage from Martha's Vineyard to South America. Though it's unclear exactly what happened, many sources later attributed his death to the Bermuda Triangle.

William Shakespeare 's play "The Tempest," which some scholars claim was based on a real-life Bermuda shipwreck, may have enhanced the area's aura of mystery. Nonetheless, reports of unexplained disappearances did not really capture the public's attention until the 20th century.

An especially infamous tragedy occurred in March 1918 when the USS Cyclops, a 542-foot-long Navy cargo ship with over 300 men and 10,000 tons of manganese ore onboard, sank somewhere between Barbados and the Chesapeake Bay. The Cyclops never sent out an SOS distress call despite being equipped to do so, and an extensive search found no wreckage. "Only God and the sea know what happened to the great ship," U.S. President Woodrow Wilson later said. In 1941 two of the Cyclops' sister ships similarly vanished without a trace along nearly the same route.

A pattern allegedly began forming in which vessels traversing the Bermuda Triangle would either disappear or be found abandoned. Then, in December 1945, five Navy bombers carrying 14 men took off from a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, airfield in order to conduct practice bombing runs over some nearby shoals. But with his compasses apparently malfunctioning, the leader of the mission, known as Flight 19, got severely lost. All five planes flew aimlessly until they ran low on fuel and were forced to ditch at sea. That same day, a rescue plane and its 13-man crew also disappeared. After a massive weeks-long search failed to turn up any evidence, the official Navy report declared that it was "as if they had flown to Mars."

Bermuda Triangle Theories and Counter-Theories

By the time author Vincent Gaddis coined the phrase "Bermuda Triangle" in a 1964 magazine article, additional mysterious accidents had occurred in the area, including three passenger planes that went down despite having just sent "all's well" messages. Charles Berlitz, whose grandfather founded the Berlitz language schools, stoked the legend even further in 1974 with a sensational bestseller about the legend.

Since then, scores of fellow paranormal writers have blamed the triangle's supposed lethalness on everything from aliens, Atlantis and sea monsters to time warps and reverse gravity fields, whereas more scientifically minded theorists have pointed to magnetic anomalies, waterspouts or huge eruptions of methane gas from the ocean floor.

In all probability, however, there is no single theory that solves the mystery. As one skeptic put it, trying to find a common cause for every Bermuda Triangle disappearance is no more logical than trying to find a common cause for every automobile accident in Arizona.

Moreover, although storms, reefs and the Gulf Stream can cause navigational challenges there, maritime insurance leader Lloyd's of London does not recognize the Bermuda Triangle as an especially hazardous place. Neither does the U.S. Coast Guard, which says: "In a review of many aircraft and vessel losses in the area over the years, there has been nothing discovered that would indicate that casualties were the result of anything other than physical causes. No extraordinary factors have ever been identified."

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Bermuda Triangle - Location, Disappearances, Flight 19

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The Bermuda Triangle is a section of the Atlantic Ocean roughly bounded by Miami, Bermuda and Puerto Rico where dozens of ships and airplanes have disappeared.

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They may not be evidence of UFOs, ancient spirits or secret weapons, but there is something magical in their allure

By Rob Irving and Peter Brookesmith

smithsonianmag.com

When Doug Bower and his co-conspirator Dave Chorley first created a representation of a "flying saucer nest" in a wheat field in Wiltshire, England, in 1976, they could not have foreseen that their work would become a cultural phenomenon.

Almost as soon as crop circles became public knowledge, they attracted a gaggle of self-appointed experts. An efflorescence of mystical and magical thinking, scientific and pseudo-scientific research, conspiracy theories and general pandemonium broke out. The patterns stamped in fields were treated as a lens through which the initiated could witness the activity of earth energies and ancient spirits, the anguish of Mother Earth in the face of impending ecological doom, and evidence of secret weapons testing and, of course, aliens. Today, one of the more vigorously promoted ideas is that they are messages, buried in complex numerological codes, concerning a Great Change connected to the pre-Columbian Mayan calendar and due to occur in 2012.

To appreciate how these exotic responses arose, we need to delve a little into history. Before today's circle-makers entered the picture, there had been scattered reports of odd patterns appearing in crops, ranging from 17th century pamphlets to an 1880 account in Nature to a letter from astronomer Patrick Moore printed in 1963 in New Scientist. In Australia, the mid- to late-1960s saw occasional reports of circles in crops, and they were often ascribed to UFO landings. At around the same time in England, the Wiltshire town of Warminster became a center of UFO-seeking "sky watches" and gave birth to its own rumors of crop circles, or "saucer nests." None of these, unfortunately, was photographed.

It was such legends that Bower had in mind when, over a drink one evening in 1976, he suggested to his pal Chorley: "Let's go over there and make it look like a flying saucer has landed." It was time, thought Doug, to see a saucer nest for himself.

Since then, crop circles have been reported worldwide in a multitude of crops. In southern England, which sees most activity, circle-makers tend to concentrate on canola, barley and wheat. These grow and are harvested in an overlapping progression: canola from April through May, barley throughout May and June, and wheat from June until early September. In recent years the occasional rudimentary pattern has been found in corn, extending the crop circle season as late as October. Since Bower and Chorley's circles appeared, the geometric designs have escalated in scale and complexity, as each year teams of anonymous circle-makers lay honey traps for New Age tourists.

A crucial clue to the circles' allure lies in their geographical context. Wiltshire is the home of Stonehenge and an even more extensive stone circle in the village of Avebury. The rolling downs are dotted with burial mounds and solitary standing stones, which many believe to be connected by an extensive network of "leys," or paths of energy linking these enchanted sites with others around the country. It is said that this vast network is overlaid in the form of "sacred geometries." The region has also given rise to a rich folklore of spectral black dogs, headless coachmen and haunted houses.

Crop circles are a lens through which we can explore the nature and appeal of hoaxes. Fakes, counterfeits and forgeries are all around us in the everyday world-from dud $50 bills to spurious Picassos. People's motives for taking the unreal as real are easily discerned: we trust our currency, and many people would like to own a Picasso. The nebulous world of the anomalous and the paranormal is even richer soil for hoaxers. A large proportion of the population believes in ghosts, angels, UFOs and ET visitations, fairies, psychokinesis and other strange phenomena. These beliefs elude scientific examination and proof. And it's just such proof that the hoaxer brings to the table for those hungry for evidence that their beliefs are not deluded.

False evidence intended to corroborate an existing legend is known to folklorists as "ostension." This process also inevitably extends the legend. For, even if the evidence is eventually exposed as false, it will have affected people's perceptions of the phenomenon it was intended to represent. Faked photographs of UFOs, Loch Ness monsters and ghosts generally fall under the heading of ostension. Another example is the series of photographs of fairies taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths at Cottingley, Yorkshire, between 1917 and 1920. These show that the motive for producing such evidence may come from belief, rather than from any wish to mislead or play pranks. One of the girls insisted till her dying day that she really had seen fairies-the manufactured pictures were a memento of her real experience. And the photos were taken as genuine by such luminaries as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle-the great exponent, in his Sherlock Holmes stories, of logic.

The desire to promote evidence of anomalous and paranormal events as genuine springs from deep human longings. One is a gesture toward rationalism-the notion that nothing is quite real unless it's endorsed by reasoned argument, and underwritten by more or less scientific proofs. But the human soul longs for enchantment. Those who don't find their instinctive sense of the numinous satisfied by art, literature or music-let alone the discoveries of science itself-may well turn to the paranormal to gratify an intuition that mystery dwells at the heart of existence. Such people are perfectly placed to accept hoaxed evidence of unexplained powers and entities as real.

And so, the annual appearance of ever more complex patterns in the wheat fields of southern England is taken by "croppies"-the devotees who look beyond any prosaic solution for deeper explanations-as signs and wonders and prophecies. The croppies do, however, accept that some people, some of the time, are making some of the formations. They regard these human circle-makers as a nuisance, contaminators of the "evidence," and denounce them as "hoaxers." The term is well chosen, for it implies social deviance. And therein lies the twist in the story.

In croppy culture, common parlance is turned on its head. The word "genuine" usually implies that something has a single, identifiable origin, of established provenance. To the croppy it means the opposite: a "genuine" circle is of unknown provenance, or not man-made-a mystery, in other words. It follows that the man-made circle is a "hoax."

Those circle-makers who are prepared to comment on this semantic reversal do so with some amusement. As far as they're concerned, they are creating art in the fields. In keeping with New Age thought, it is by dissociating with scientific tradition that the circle-makers return art to a more unified function, where images and objects are imbued with special powers.

This art is intended to be a provocative, collective and ritual enterprise. And as such, it is often inherently ambiguous and open to interpretation. To the circle-maker, the greater the range of interpretations inspired in the audience the better. Both makers and interpreters have an interest in the circles being perceived as magical, and this entails their tacit agreement to avoid questions of authorship. This is essentially why croppies regard "man-made" circles as a distraction, a "contamination."

Paradoxically, and unlike almost all other modern forms of art, a crop circle's potential to enchant is animated and energized by the anonymity of its author(s). Doug Bower now tells friends that he wishes he had kept quiet and continued his nocturnal jaunts in secret. Both circle-makers and croppies are really engaged in a kind of game, whose whole purpose is to keep the game going, to prolong the mystery. After all, who would travel thousands of miles and trek through a muddy field to see flattened wheat if it were not imbued with otherworldly mystique?

As things stand, the relationship between the circle-makers and those who interpret their work has become a curious symbiosis of art and artifice, deception and belief. All of which raises the question: Who's hoaxing whom?

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By Rob Irving and Peter Brookesmith smithsonianmag.com When Doug Bower and his co-conspirator Dave Chorley first created a representation of a "flying saucer nest" in a wheat field in Wiltshire, England, in 1976, they could not have foreseen that their work would become a cultural phenomenon.

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What has kept the myth of Atlantis for so many thousands of years?

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The mystery of Amelia Earhart's disappearance somewhere over the Pacific Ocean in July 1937 during her around-the-world flight attempt persists to the present day, and is especially alive and well on the Internet. If you were to Google the term "Amelia Earhart Disappearance," for example, the list of hits would be about 1,950,000 items! Some websites, too numerous to mention, are filled with crank conspiratorial ideas. One, for example, militarycorruption.com, claims that U.S. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal was involved in the cover-up of the destruction of Earhart's Lockheed Electra 10E at Aslito Field on Saipan in 1944. The site doesn't exactly say why Forrestal would have done such a thing, but the implication is that he was attempting to efface any evidence that might have implicated Earhart in a secret spy mission for the U.S. government.

Nevertheless, the idea that people are still fascinated by Earhart's disappearance after seventy-three years, whether it is tied up in conspiratorial theories or not, is worthy of note. The government put forth an extraordinary attempt to find Earhart that went on for sixteen days, involved nine vessels, four thousand crewmen, and sixty-six aircraft at a cost of more than $4 million. All of this was to no avail. As Tom Crouch puts it, the contingent of ships and aircraft "searched an area of the Pacific roughly the size of Texas without turning up a clue. Radio operators in the United States and across the Pacific reported receiving everything from surefire messages from Earhart to strange sounds that could have been from her. Authorities dismissed the flurry of reports as either wishful thinking or cruel hoaxes."

Those wishful thoughts and cruel hoaxes seemed to be a harbinger of things to come. Almost immediately after Earhart's disappearance, stories about Earhart's whereabouts began to pop up. Perhaps more important, a few years after Earhart was declared legally dead on January 5, 1939, her husband George Palmer Putnam approved a treatment for a film to be titled Stand By to Die, to be produced by RKO, which contained some resemblances to the facts about Earhart's life and disappearance, for which the Amelia Earhart estate would receive $7500. (Putnam had hoped that his own idea for a film about his wife, which would be called Lady with Wings: The Story of My Wife, Amelia Earhart, would be produced, but there had been no takers, and the Earhart estate was in poor financial condition.) Putnam reluctantly agreed to sign the agreement so long as there would be no obvious similarities between the film and Earhart's life.

The film was eventually produced by RKO, and it was renamed Flight for Freedom.

It starred Rosalind Russell as a woman aviator, Tonie Carter, whose ambition was to fly around the world, and Fred MacMurray, as Randy Britton, a hotshot pilot who accompanies Tonie on the flight as navigator. Flight for Freedom appears to have laid the groundwork for a whole series of speculations about what happened to Earhart and Noonan. These scenarios range from the idea that the flight had been a secret spying mission for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to the notion that Earhart and Noonan had landed on Saipan, and were captured and killed by the Japanese, to the idea that Earhart was captured by the Japanese and had reappeared as "Tokyo Rose," a name for women whom the Japanese forced to broadcast propaganda to American troops in the Pacific during World War II, or that Earhart had assumed another identity and was discovered to be living in New Jersey.

What probably did happen to Earhart and Noonan? Richard Gillespie, head of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), is an Earhart disappearance researcher who has gained some credibility. TIGHAR has made numerous trips to Nikumaroro (formerly Gardner Island), a remote coral atoll in the Western Pacific Ocean, the place where the organization believes Earhart and Noonan ended up. They have turned up some interesting finds: an aluminum panel that might possibly have come from an Electra; a piece of curved glass that might be a window from an Electra; a heel from a woman's shoe like the kind of footware, Earhart wore, among other items. None of these, however, can conclusively be connected to Earhart and Noonan. Gillespie has written a book titled Finding Amelia: The True Story of the Earhart Disappearance, which puts forth his ideas about the disappearance.

Elgin Long, an experienced pilot and another longtime Earhart disappearance theorist, offers perhaps the most plausible explanation for the disappearance. Having experienced bad weather during the long 4,113 km (2,556 miles) flight from Lea to Howland Island, Earhart and Noonan used up their supply of fuel, and crash landed in the ocean. Long notes the urgency in Earhart's voice on the radio on the way to Howland Island, when she was trying to locate the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Itasca, the ship that was assigned the task of providing navigational and radio links to Earhart and Noonan. Long has written a book (with Marie K. Long) titled Amelia Earhart: The Mystery Solved, in which he puts forth a well-constructed argument that the aircraft came to rest at the bottom of the ocean near Howland Island.

On the significance of the disappearance, Doris Rich, one of Earhart's biographers, believes that "nothing she might have said or done, no scheme George Palmer Putnam might have designed, could so enhance Earhart's renown as the mystery of her disappearance. She had been famous. By vanishing she became legendary." By the same token, her disappearance ironically seems to have overtaken her life's accomplishments as an aviator and advocate for women's rights. Susan Ware, author of Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Search for Modern Feminism, points out that "with all the mythology surrounding Amelia Earhart's last flight in 1937, it is hard to assess her career separately from the ongoing mystery of her disappearance." Ware suggests that it is Earhart's life, not the disappearance and presumed death that matters.

Nevertheless, it is Earhart's disappearance that has captured the imagination of Americans in the nearly three quarters of a century since she vanished. What does this say about us as a society? The implication, perhaps, is that Americans are prone to believe things that are unproven and unable to think analytically enough to question ideas founded on baseless evidence. Another is that we have an obsessive need to explain mysteries that have no obvious solutions. Whatever the reasons, the ideas about Earhart's disappearance, like the widespread belief in UFOs, or in the various conspiracy theories that have arisen around such events as the JFK assassination, Watergate, and 9/11, persist and have become part and parcel of the American psyche.

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The Legend of Amelia Earhart's Disappearance

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The mystery of Amelia Earhart's disappearance somewhere over the Pacific Ocean in July 1937 during her around-the-world flight attempt persists to the present day, and is especially alive and well on the Internet.

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On March 1, 1932, in a crime that captured the attention of the entire nation, Charles Lindbergh Jr., the 20-month-old son of aviation hero Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, is kidnapped from the family's new mansion in Hopewell, New Jersey. Lindbergh, who became an international celebrity when he flew the first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927, and his wife Anne discovered a ransom note demanding $50,000 in their son's empty room. The kidnapper used a ladder to climb up to the open second-floor window and left muddy footprints in the room.

The Lindberghs were inundated by offers of assistance and false clues. Even Al Capone offered his help from prison. For three days, investigators found nothing and there was no further word from the kidnappers. Then, a new letter showed up, this time demanding $70,000.

The kidnappers eventually gave instructions for dropping off the money and when it was delivered, the Lindberghs were told their baby was on a boat called Nelly off the coast of Massachusetts. After an exhaustive search, however, there was no sign of either the boat or the child. Soon after, the baby's body was discovered near the Lindbergh mansion. He had been killed the night of the kidnapping and was found less than a mile from home. The heartbroken Lindberghs ended up donating the mansion to charity and moved away.

The kidnapping looked like it would go unsolved until September 1934, when a marked bill from the ransom turned up. The gas station attendant who had accepted the bill wrote down the license plate number because he was suspicious of the driver. It was tracked back to a German immigrant and carpenter, Bruno Hauptmann. When his home was searched, detectives found a chunk of Lindbergh ransom money.

Hauptmann claimed that a friend had given him the money to hold and that he had no connection to the crime. The resulting trial was a national sensation. The prosecution's case was not particularly strong; the main evidence, besides the money, was testimony from handwriting experts that the ransom note had been written by Hauptmann. The prosecution also tried to establish a connection between Hauptmann and the type of wood that was used to make the ladder.

Still, the evidence and intense public pressure were enough to convict Hauptmann and he was electrocuted in 1936. In the aftermath of the crime-the most notorious of the 1930s-kidnapping was made a federal offense.
READ MORE: Inside the Capture of the Lindbergh Baby Kidnapper

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On March 1, 1932, in a crime that captured the attention of the entire nation, Charles Lindbergh Jr., the 20-month-old son of aviation hero Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, is kidnapped from the family's new mansion in Hopewell, New Jersey.

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Tales of sacred, restorative waters existed well before the birth of Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León around 1474. Alexander the Great, for example, was said to have come across a healing "river of paradise" in the fourth century B.C., and similar legends cropped up in such disparate locations as the Canary Islands, Japan, Polynesia and England. During the Middle Ages, some Europeans even believed in the mythical king Prester John, whose kingdom allegedly contained a fountain of youth and a river of gold. "You could trace that up until today," said Ryan K. Smith, a history professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. "People are still touting miracle cures and miracle waters."

Spanish sources asserted that the Taino Indians of the Caribbean also spoke of a magic fountain and rejuvenating river that existed somewhere north of Cuba. These rumors conceivably reached the ears of Ponce de León, who is thought to have accompanied Christopher Columbus on his second voyage to the New World in 1493. After helping to brutally crush a Taino rebellion on Hispaniola in 1504, Ponce de León was granted a provincial governorship and hundreds of acres of land, where he used forced Indian labor to raise crops and livestock. In 1508 he received royal permission to colonize San Juan Bautista (now Puerto Rico). He became the island's first governor a year later, but was soon pushed out in a power struggle with Christopher Columbus' son Diego.

Having remained in the good graces of King Ferdinand, Ponce de León received a contract in 1512 to explore and settle an island called Bimini. Nowhere in either this contract or a follow-up contract was the Fountain of Youth mentioned. By contrast, specific instructions were given for subjugating the Indians and divvying up any gold found. Although he may have claimed to know certain "secrets," Ponce de León likewise never brought up the fountain in his known correspondence with Ferdinand.

"What Ponce is really looking for is islands that will become part of what he hopes will be a profitable new governorship," said J. Michael Francis, a history professor at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. "From everything I can gather, he was not at all interested or believed that he would find some kind of miraculous spring or lake or body of water." At least one historian suggests that perhaps Ferdinand, who had recently married a woman 35 years his junior, told Ponce de León to keep his eye out for it. But other experts dispute this.

Either way, Ponce de León set sail in March 1513 with three ships. According to early historians, he anchored off the eastern coast of Florida on April 2 and came ashore a day later, choosing the name "La Florida" in part because it was the Easter season (Pascua Florida in Spanish). Ponce de León then journeyed down through the Florida Keys and up the western coast, where he skirmished with Indians, before beginning a roundabout journey back to Puerto Rico. Along the way he purportedly discovered the Gulf Stream, which proved to be the fastest route for sailing back to Europe.

Eight years later, Ponce de León returned to Florida's southwestern coast in an attempt to establish a colony, but he was mortally wounded by an Indian arrow. Just before leaving, he sent letters to his new king, Charles V, and to the future Pope Adrian VI. Once again, the explorer made no mention of the Fountain of Youth, focusing instead on his desire to settle the land, spread Christianity and discover whether Florida was an island or peninsula. No log of either voyage has survived, and no archaeological footprint has ever been uncovered.

Nonetheless, historians began linking Ponce de León with the Fountain of Youth not long after his death. In 1535 Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés accused Ponce de León of seeking the fountain in order to cure his sexual impotence. "He was being discredited [as] an idiot and weakling," Smith explained. "This is machismo culture in Spain at the height of the Counter-Reformation." The accusation is almost certainly untrue, Smith added, since Ponce de León fathered several children and was under 40 years old at the time of his first expedition.

Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda, who lived with Indians in Florida for many years after surviving a shipwreck, also derided Ponce de León in his 1575 memoir, saying it was a cause for merriment that he sought out the Fountain of Youth. One of the next authors to weigh in was Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, the Spanish king's chief historian of the Indies. In 1601 he penned a detailed and widely read account of Ponce de León's first voyage. Although Herrera only referred to the Fountain of Youth in passing, writing that it turned "old men to boys," he helped solidify it in the public's imagination. "They are really more entertainment than attempts to write a true history," Francis said of these works.

The Fountain of Youth legend was now alive and well. It did not gain much traction in the United States, however, until the Spanish ceded Florida in 1819. Famous writers of the time such as Washington Irving then began portraying Ponce de León as hapless and vain. Artists also got in on the act, including Thomas Moran, who painted an oversize canvas of Ponce de León meeting with Indians. By the early 20th century, a statue of the explorer had been placed in the central plaza of Florida's oldest city, St. Augustine, and a nearby tourist attraction pretended to be the actual Fountain of Youth. To this day, tens of thousands of visitors come every year to sample the sulfur-smelling well water. "It does not taste good," said Smith, who worked there for four days in college. "Imagine what you would think the Fountain of Youth would taste like. It doesn't taste like that." Meanwhile, some grade school textbooks continue to present Ponce de León's search for the fountain as historical fact.

In 2013, Ponce de León was back in the spotlight. In celebration of the 500th anniversary of his landing, reenactments took place in St. Augustine and Melbourne Beach, Florida, both of which claim to be the site where he first dropped anchor. There was also a Catholic mass in St. Augustine featuring a replica of the 15th-century font used to baptize him in Spain and a mass in Melbourne Beach, along with the unveiling of more statues and a commemorative stamp.

What would Ponce de León make of all this attention, not all of it positive? "My take on that is that no publicity is bad publicity," Smith said. "He's a household name, and maybe in the end that's what he was looking for."

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The Myth of Ponce de León and the Fountain of Youth | HISTORY

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Find out how the Spanish explorer's name became inextricably linked with the Fountain of Youth.

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Have you ever felt an unseen presence? Caught something - or someone - moving out of the corner of your eye? Walked into a cold draft in a warm room?

If you've ever experienced something you just can't explain, something that can only be described as supernatural, you aren't alone.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans say they've experienced a paranormal encounter of some kind, according to a 2022 YouGov poll. That includes things like hearing unexplained voices, seeing objects inexplicably move on their own, as well as other events that defy all logic.

And one in five people polled claimed to have seen a spirit or a ghost.

While hauntings and visits from the great beyond make for scary horror movies and ghost stories, the question "Are ghosts real?" is one people of almost every culture have been pondering for thousands of years, if not since the very beginning of time.

To help answer it, TODAY reached out to a trio of experts including a medium, a psychic and a professor specializing in parapsychology, to share their thoughts on the spirit world, ghosts, apparitions and whether or not they really exist.

And, if you're experiencing a haunting or hosting an unwanted visitor, they've got some advice that just might help.

Here's what you need to know.

For many people, the word "ghost" conjures up one of two images: A menacing apparition that terrorizes unsuspecting homeowners, or a cute trick-or-treater covered in a white bed sheet.

Pop-culture perceptions aside, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a ghost as a "disembodied soul," or the soul of someone who's died that either lives in the spirit world or, somehow, still exists in ours.

Sherrie Dillard, medium and author of the book "I'm Still With You," says it's important to distinguish between ghosts and the spirits of loved ones who have passed on. Because according to Dillard, they aren't the same thing.

When loved ones die, she says they leave the earth and pass into a "higher loving existence," whether it be heaven, "the light" or any other concept of the afterlife.

Similar to ghosts, Dillard says that we may occasionally feel the presence of those loved ones after they are gone, whether it be in dreams, paranormal activity or other encounter. And in those instances, she says we typically have feelings of warmth, recognition or love.

"It doesn't emotionally incite," she tells TODAY.com. "For most people, we don't get scared or fearful. Most of the time people will recognize, 'Oh, I feel like my grandmother was here, or my mother or father, or just have that feeling.'"

Ghosts, however, are a different story. Dillard says we rarely, if ever, know who they are. "Usually, it strikes us as a different energy. It strikes us as something we're not familiar with," she explains.

If not acquaintances or loved ones, then...who are they?

"Most commonly, ghosts are human beings, people who pass over and, for various reasons, resist going into that higher level of love and resolution," says Dillard. She explains that one of the reasons a ghost might stick around instead of moving on to "the other side" is trauma.

"They may have been in a sudden accident, or some trauma unexpectedly, and they don't realize that they are actually passed over," she says. "I know that sounds strange, but it's true."

Confused or "lost," the ghost lingers. "What they do is they try clinging to any kind of energy source; they'll cling to a house or the people in the house."

Ghosts can also be attached to other physical objects, she says, including antiques or anything with a "strong emotional energy."

Psychic and medium Chip Coffey has appeared on more than 130 paranormal TV shows, including "Kindred Spirits." And much like Dillard, he considers ghosts to be deceased people whose souls haven't properly transitioned.

"They're kind of stuck in the middle someplace. They've remained on the third-dimension plane and, for whatever reason, they may have, they haven't completed their transition into Spirit," he tells TODAY.com.

What does science say about ghosts?

Christine Simmonds-Moore, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology at the University of West Georgia who specializes in parapsychological research.

According to Simmonds-Moore, ghosts are found in every single culture and have been recorded throughout history.

"Ghosts come from experience," she tells TODAY.com. "So, human beings have had experiences with spirits - and we can be neutral on whether some of those are genuine spirits, or whether they are explained more normally. But irrespective of that, people have had experiences because it's a big part of being human."

Whether those experiences are related to more earthly things like a near-death experience, loss of a loved one, or occur in an altered state such as a dream, deep relaxation or are chemically induced, in trying to understand them, they can change our perception or beliefs.

From there, those beliefs can lead to other experiences, including seeing ghosts. Bottom line? If you think there are ghosts, then you're more inclined to think you've seen one.

"There's a whole hierarchy of different types of ghost experiences," Simmonds-Moore says, "and some of them are much more easy to explain using normal psychology than others."

That said, Simmonds-Moore says that there are incidences in which people have paranormal encounters and inexplicably gain "access to information that they didn't have access to" prior to those encounters. And those are somewhat less easy to explain.

Examples include things like people traveling to a location they've never been to, yet they "seem to know things what they shouldn't know," including events that occurred there or what a person they've never met was wearing, and other unexplainable circumstances.

"It doesn't mean that it's the media idea of a ghost, that there's something persisting and haunting. It could be that it's information that is tied to a place ,and some people who are in these different states are more able to notice that information and have access to than others," she says.

According to Simmonds-Moore, some people believe they've had encounters with deceased loved ones, which is understandable given feelings of bereavement and loss, she says.

"But sometimes they might know that somebody's going to pass before they do, or they might an encounter with an apparition, and they don't know that the person has actually passed away and they see the apparition at the point of death and dying," she says.

More than that, they might know how the person died even before the information has been relayed.

"I think that there are probably some extremely strong cases that are very rare, where you can't always apply the normal explanation," Simmonds-Moore says. "But the fact that they occur at all is interesting."

So does all of this information make the case that ghosts are real?

"I think it's probably more like information that has aspects of somebody's life that might persist, and then other people might be able to access that field of consciousness," Simmonds-Moore says.

Whether they exist in the traditional sense or not, Simmonds-Moore says that there are many, very rare experiences that are difficult to explain.

In those cases, normal explanations don't necessarily fit.

"This implies that there are some experiences that are more intriguing, so there is a big question mark for those."

When it's a loved one visiting us, Coffey says there are a variety of reasons to explain why they've come.

"Sometimes it's because they love us and they want us to understand that death is not the end, that death doesn't end relationships - it just alters them, changes them. Sometimes it's because we call them up and they can choose whether or not they're going to interact with us. But many times, they'll willingly come through and bridge that gap where our two realms connect," he says.

Ghosts, however, have a different agenda, says Dillard.

"Wherever there's strong emotional energy, they're attracted to it because they need a source of energy," she says. "And sometimes ghosts will want to be known, they'll want to be recognized, because they want our emotional reaction."

Even if that reaction is stress or fear, Dillard says ghosts don't mind because one way or another, they're receiving the attention or emotional energy they're seeking. "They sometimes want help, too. They'll want someone to see them, know them, know there's something here and tell them where to go."

In rare cases, Dillard says certain ghosts, like poltergeists, have a darker purpose and, unlike lost souls seeking direction, they gravitate toward negative energy.

For instance, places with a lot of history or where bad things or traumas have occurred can attract these negative spirits.

"They invoke an incredible amount of fear in people for good reason. If you've got something flying across the room, it could hurt you. And they don't tend to react or respond to us in any other way than invoking fear in a negative, powerful way," she explains.

Even more rare are demonic spirits like the one portrayed in the horror movie "The Exorcist." But according to Dillard, they do exist. "They will happen," she says. "There's documented cases of things."

What to do if you think you have a ghost?

While some people are convinced that ghosts, spirits, poltergeists or other otherworldly apparitions are real, there are, of course, skeptics.

"In my line of work, I get that all the time," says Dillard. "I just tell people that it's fine. With things like this, we can only really believe if we've experienced them.

"We can believe it's possible, we can believe that maybe someone else may believe it. But, normally, we become true believers when we've had some form of experience."

According to Coffey, he's seen far too much to not believe there's more than meets the eye.

"How can there be so many stories about ghosts and spirits and paranormal things and just the realm of the weird for there not to be something there? I mean, where there's smoke, there's fire."

He also dismisses the idea that only certain places on earth are "haunted."

"I think every place is haunted. 'Haunted' is not a bad word. It's just the presence of paranormal or spiritual activity," he says.

"There can be the 'mom-and-pop' garden variety, non-malicious, non-malevolent haunting. Absolutely. A lot of people have died throughout history. There are a lot of dead people out there. So, 'haunted?' You've probably got spirits floating in this space right here. Most places have spirit activity," Coffey explains.

For the average person, however, a ghost encounter, whether benign or not, can be pretty unsettling, if not downright scary.

If you believe it's happening to you, Dillard suggests firmly, but kindly, telling them to leave.

"You can send a thought message, you can send a verbal message," she says. "And that is: 'You don't belong here. You're no longer in the physical world, and there's a better place for you.'"

And in most cases, she says that it's enough.

When it's not, then it might be time to enlist the help of an expert.

"If you have a malicious or malevolent haunting, that's when you have to call in the troops and get the help you need in trying to expel it," says Coffey. "Get in touch with a reputable paranormal team that's going to give you some good, sound advice on how to handle what's going on in your house."

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Are ghosts real? What to know on hauntings and paranormal activity

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The experts weigh in on whether or not ghosts are real, hauntings, paranormal activity, poltergeists and what some believe happens after we die.

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Editor's Note: This article was adapted from its original form and updated to include new information for Smithsonian's Mysteries of the Ancient World bookazine published in Fall 2009.
"There exists in the midst of the great ocean, in a region where nobody goes, a mysterious and isolated island," wrote the 19th-century French seafarer and artist Pierre Loti. "The island is planted with monstrous great statues, the work of I don't know what race, today degenerate or vanished; its great remains an enigma." Named Easter Island by the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, who first spied it on Easter Day 1722, this tiny spit of volcanic rock in the vast South Seas is, even today, the most remote inhabited place on earth. Its nearly 1,000 statues, some almost 30 feet tall and weighing as much as 80 tons, are still an enigma, but the statue builders are far from vanished. In fact, their descendants are making art and renewing their cultural traditions in an island renaissance.

To early travelers, the spectacle of immense stone figures, at once serenely godlike and savagely human, was almost beyond imagining. The island's population was too small, too primitive and too isolated to be credited with such feats of artistry, engineering and labor. "We could hardly conceive how these islanders, wholly unacquainted with any mechanical power, could raise such stupendous figures," the British mariner Capt. James Cook wrote in 1774. He freely speculated on how the statues might have been raised, a little at a time, using piles of stones and scaffolding; and there has been no end of speculation, and no lack of scientific investigation, in the centuries that followed. By Cook's time, the islanders had toppled many of their statues and were neglecting those left standing. But the art of Easter Island still looms on the horizon of the human imagination.

Just 14 miles long and 7 miles wide, the island is more than 2,000 miles off the coast of South America and 1,100 miles from its nearest Polynesian neighbor, Pitcairn Island, where mutineers from the HMS Bounty hid in the 19th century. Too far south for a tropical climate, lacking coral reefs and perfect beaches, and whipped by perennial winds and seasonal downpours, Easter Island nonetheless possesses a rugged beauty-a mixture of geology and art, of volcanic cones and lava flows, steep cliffs and rocky coves. Its megalithic statues are even more imposing than the landscape, but there is a rich tradition of island arts in forms less solid than stone-in wood and bark cloth, strings and feathers, songs and dances, and in a lost form of pictorial writing called rongorongo, which has eluded every attempt to decipher it. A society of hereditary chiefs, priests, clans and guilds of specialized craftsmen lived in isolation for 1,000 years.

History, as much as art, made this island unique. But attempts to unravel that history have produced many interpretations and arguments. The missionary's anecdotes, the archaeologist's shovel, the anthropologist's oral histories and boxes of bones have all revealed something of the island's story. But by no means everything. When did the first people arrive? Where did they come from? Why did they carve such enormous statues? How did they move them and raise them up onto platforms? Why, after centuries, did they topple these idols? Such questions have been answered again and again, but the answers keep changing.

Over the past few decades, archaeologists have assembled evidence that the first settlers came from another Polynesian island, but they can't agree on which one. Estimates of when people first reached the island are as varied, ranging from the first to the sixth century A.D. And how they ever found the place, whether by design or accident, is yet another unresolved question.

Some argue that the navigators of the first millennium could never have plotted a course over such immense distances without modern precision instruments. Others contend that the early Polynesians were among the world's most skilled seafarers-masters of the night sky and the ocean's currents. One archaeoastronomer suggests that a new supernova in the ancient skies may have pointed the way. But did the voyagers know the island was even there? For that, science has no answer. The islanders, however, do.

Benedicto Tuki was a tall 65-year-old master wood-carver and keeper of ancient knowledge when I met him. (Tuki has since died.) His piercing eyes were set in a deeply creased, mahogany face. He introduced himself as a descendant of the island's first king, Hotu Matu'a, who, he said, brought the original settlers from an island named Hiva in the Marquesas. He claimed his grandmother was the island's last queen. He would tell me about Hotu Matu'a, he said that day, but only from the center of the island, at a platform called Ahu Akivi with its seven giant statues. There, he could recount the story in the right way.

In Tuki's native tongue, the island-like the people and the language-is called Rapa Nui. Platforms are called ahu, and the statues that sit on them, moai (pronounced mo-eye). As our jeep negotiated a rutted dirt road, the seven moai loomed into view. Their faces were paternal, all-knowing and human-forbiddingly human. These seven, Tuki said, were not watching over the land like those statues with their backs to the sea. These stared out beyond the island, across the ocean to the west, remembering where they came from. When Hotu Matu'a arrived on the island, Tuki added, he brought seven different races with him, which became the seven tribes of Rapa Nui. These moai represent the original ancestor from the Marquesas and the kings of other Polynesian islands. Tuki himself gazed into the distance as he chanted their names. "This is not written down," he said. "My grandmother told me before she died." His was the 68th generation, he added, since Hotu Matu'a.

Because of fighting at home, Tuki continued, chief Hotu Matu'a gathered his followers for a voyage to a new land. His tattooist and priest, Hau Maka, had flown across the ocean in a dream and seen Rapa Nui and its location, which he described in detail. Hotu Matu'a and his brother-in-law set sail in long double canoes, loaded with people, food, water, plant cuttings and animals. After a voyage of two months, they sailed into Anakena Bay, which was just as the tattooist had described it.

Sometimes, says Cristián Arévalo Pakarati, an island artist who has worked with several archaeologists, the old stories hold as much truth as anything the scientists unearth. He tells me this as we climb up the cone of a volcano called Rano Raraku to the quarry where the great moai were once carved. The steep path winds through an astonishing landscape of moai, standing tilted and without order, many buried up to their necks, some fallen facedown on the slope, apparently abandoned here before they were ever moved. Pakarati is dwarfed by a stone head as he stops to lean against it. "It's hard to imagine," he says, "how the carvers must have felt when they were told to stop working. They'd been carving these statues here for centuries, until one day the boss shows up and tells them to quit, to go home, because there's no more food, there's a war and nobody believes in the statue system anymore!" Pakarati identifies strongly with his forebears; working with Jo Anne Van Tilburg, an archaeologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, he's spent many years making drawings and measurements of all the island's moai. (He and Van Tilburg have also teamed up to create the new Galería Mana, intended to showcase and sustain traditional artisanry on the island.)

Now, as Pakarati and I climb into the quarry itself, he shows me where the carving was done.The colossal figures are in every stage of completion, laid out on their backs with a sort of stone keel attaching them to the bedrock. Carved from a soft stone called lapilli tuff, a compressed volcanic ash, several figures lie side by side in a niche. "These people had absolute control over the stone," Pakarati says of the carvers. "They could move statues from here to Tahai, which is 15 kilometers away, without breaking the nose, the lips, the fingers or anything." Then he points to a few broken heads and bodies on the slope below and laughs. "Obviously, accidents were allowed."

When a statue was almost complete, the carvers drilled holes through the keel to break it off from the bedrock, then slid it down the slope into a big hole, where they could stand it up to finish the back. Eye sockets were carved once a statue was on its ahu, and white coral and obsidian eyes were inserted during ceremonies to awaken the moai's power. In some cases, the statues were adorned with huge cylindrical hats or topknots of red scoria, another volcanic stone. But first a statue had to be moved over one of the roads that led to the island's nearly 300 ahu. How that was done is still a matter of dispute. Rapa Nui legends say the moai "walked" with the help of a chief or priest who had mana, or supernatural power. Archaeologists have proposed other methods for moving the statues, using various combinations of log rollers, sledges and ropes.

Trying to sort out the facts of the island's past has led researchers into one riddle after another-from the meaning of the monuments to the reasons for the outbreak of warfare and the cultural collapse after a thousand years of peace. Apart from oral tradition, there is no historical record before the first European ships arrived. But evidence from many disciplines, such as the excavation of bones and weapons, the study of fossilized vegetation, and the analysis of stylistic changes in the statues and petroglyphs allows a rough historical sketch to emerge: the people who settled on the island found it covered with trees, a valuable resource for making canoes and eventually useful in transporting the moai. They brought with them plants and animals to provide food, although the only animals that survived were chickens and tiny Polynesian rats. Artistic traditions, evolving in isolation, produced a rich imagery of ornaments for the chiefs, priests and their aristocratic lineages. And many islanders from the lower-caste tribes achieved status as master carvers, divers, canoe builders or members of other artisan's guilds. Georgia Lee, an archaeologist who spent six years documenting the island's petroglyphs, finds them as remarkable as the moai. "There's nothing like it in Polynesia," she says of this rock art. "The size, scope, beauty of designs and workmanship is extraordinary."

At some point in the island's history, when both the art and the population were increasing, the island's resources were overtaxed. Too many trees had been cut down. "Without trees you've got no canoes," says Pakarati. "Without canoes you've got no fish, so I think people were already starving when they were carving these statues. The early moai were thinner, but these last statues have great curved bellies. What you reflect in your idols is an ideal, so when everybody's hungry, you make them fat, and big." When the islanders ran out of resources, Pakarati speculates, they threw their idols down and started killing each other.

Some archaeologists point to a layer of subsoil with many obsidian spear points as a sign of sudden warfare. Islanders say there was probably cannibalism, as well as carnage, and seem to think no less of their ancestors because of it. Smithsonian forensic anthropologist Douglas Owsley, who has studied the bones of some 600 individuals from the island, has found numerous signs of trauma, such as blows to the face and head. But only occasionally, he says, did these injuries result in death. In any case, a population that grew to as many as 20,000 was reduced to only a few thousand at most when the captains of the first European ships counted them in the early 18th century. Over the next 150 years, with visits by European and American sailors, French traders and missionaries, Peruvian slave raiders, Chilean imperialists and Scottish ranchers (who introduced sheep and herded the natives off the land, fencing them into one small village), the Rapa Nui people were all but destroyed. By 1877 there were only 110 natives left on the island.

Although the population rebounded steadily through the 20th century, native islanders still don't own their land. The Chilean government claimed possession of Easter Island in 1888 and, in 1935, designated it a national park, to preserve thousands of archaeological sites. (Archaeologist Van Tilburg estimates that there could be as many as 20,00o sites on the island.) Today, about 2,000 native people and about as many Chileans crowd into the island's only village, Hanga Roa, and its outskirts. Under growing pressure, the Chilean government is giving back a small number of homesteads to native families, alarming some archaeologists and stirring intense debate. But though they remain largely dispossessed, the Rapa Nui people have re-emerged from the shadows of the past, recovering and reinventing their ancient art and culture.

Carving a small wooden moai in his yard, Andreas Pakarati, who goes by Panda, is part of that renewal. "I'm the first professional tattooist on the island in 100 years," he says, soft eyes flashing under a rakish black beret. Panda's interest was stirred by pictures he saw in a book as a teenager, and tattoo artists from Hawaii and other Polynesian islands taught him their techniques. He has taken most of his designs from Rapa Nui rock art and from Georgia Lee's 1992 book on the petroglyphs. "Now," says Panda, "the tattoo is reborn."

Other artists of Panda's generation are also breathing new life into old art. In his small studio that doubles as living space, the walls lined with large canvases of Polynesian warriors and tattooed faces, Cristián Silva paints Rapa Nui themes with his own touch of swirling surrealism. "I paint because I appreciate my culture," he says. "The moai are cool, and I feel connected to ancestral things. On this island you can't escape that! But I don't copy them. I try to find a different point of view."

The dancers and musicians of the Kari Kari company, shouting native chants and swaying like palms in the wind, are among the most striking symbols of renewal. "We're trying to keep the culture alive," says Jimmy Araki, one of the musicians. "We're trying to recuperate all our ancient stuff and put it back together, and give it a new uprising." Dancer Carolina Edwards, 22, arrives for a rehearsal astride a bright red all-terrain vehicle, ducks behind some pickup trucks on a hill overlooking one of the giant statues and emerges moments later in the ancient dress of Rapa Nui women, a bikini made of tapa, or bark cloth. "When I was little they used to call me tokerau, which means wind, because I used to run a lot, and jump out of trees," she says, laughing. "Most of the islanders play guitar and know how to dance. We're born with the music."

But some scholars, and some islanders, say the new forms have less to do with ancient culture than with today's tourist dollars. "What you have now is reinventing," says Rapa Nui archaeologist Sergio Rapu, a former governor of the island. "But the people in the culture don't like to say we're reinventing. So you have to say, 'OK, that's Rapa Nui culture.' It's a necessity. The people are feeling a lack of what they lost."

Even the oldest and most traditional of artisans, like Benedicto Tuki, agree that tourists provide essential support for their culture-but he insisted, when we spoke, that the culture is intact, that its songs and skills carry ancient knowledge into the present. Grant McCall, an anthropologist from the University of New South Wales in Australia, concurs. When I ask McCall, who has recorded the genealogies of island families since 1968, how a culture could be transmitted through only 110 people, he tugs at his scruffy blond mustache. "Well, it only takes two people," he says, "somebody who is speaking and somebody who is listening."

Since many families' claims to land are based on their presumed knowledge of ancestral boundaries, the argument is hardly academic. Chilean archaeologist Claudio Cristino, who spent 25 years documenting and restoring the island's treasures, frames the debate in dramatic terms. "There are native people on the island, and all over the world, who are using the past to recover their identities, land and power," he says. Sitting in his office at the University of Chile in Santiago, he is not sanguine. "As a scientist, I've spent half my life there. It's my island! And now people are already clearing land and plowing it for agriculture, destroying archaeological sites. Behind the statues you have people with their dreams, their needs to develop the island. Are we as scientists responsible for that? The question is, who owns the past?" Who, indeed? The former mayor of Hanga Roa, Petero Edmunds, who is Rapa Nui, opposes the Chilean government's plans for giving away land. He wants the entire park returned to Rapa Nui control, to be kept intact. "But they won't listen," he says. "They've got their fingers in their ears." And who should look after it? "The people of Rapa Nui who have looked after it for a thousand years," he answers. He becomes pensive. "The moai are not silent," he says. "They speak. They're an example our ancestors created in stone, of something that is within us, which we call spirit. The world must know this spirit is alive."
UPDATE: According to the UK Telegraph, two British scientists have uncovered new research answering the riddle of why some of the megaliths are crowned by hats carved of red stone. Colin Richards of the University of Manchester and Sue Hamilton of University College London retraced a centuries-old road that leads to an ancient quarry, where island inhabitants mined red volcanic pumice. They believe that the hats first were first introduced as a distinctive feature between 1200 and 1300, a period when the island's brooding, mysterious statues were created on a scale larger than before, weighing several tons. The hats, the British experts theorize, may represent a plait or top knot, styles which would have been worn by chieftains then engaged in an epic struggle for dominance. "Chieftain society," says Hamilton, "was highly competitive and it has been suggested that they were competing so much that they over-ran their resources."

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The more we learn about the remote island from archaeologists and researchers, the more intriguing it becomes

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Stonehenge in southern England ranks among the world's most iconic archaeological sites and one of its greatest enigmas. The megalithic circle on Salisbury Plain inspires awe and fascination-but also intense debate some 4,600 years after it was built by ancient Britons who left no written record.

The monument's mysterious past has spawned countless tales and theories. According to folklore, Stonehenge was created by Merlin, the wizard of Arthurian legend, who magically transported the massive stones from Ireland, where giants had assembled them. Another legend says invading Danes put the stones up, and another theory says they were the ruins of a Roman temple. Modern-day interpretations are no less colorful: some argue that Stonehenge is a spacecraft landing area for aliens, and even more say it's a giant fertility symbol in the shape of female genitalia.

Archaeological investigation of the site dates back to the 1660s, when it was first surveyed by antiquarian John Aubrey. Aubrey wrongly credited Stonehenge to the much later Celts, believing it to be a religious center presided over by Druid priests.

Centuries of fieldwork since show the monument was more than a millennium in the making, starting out 5,000 years ago as a circular earthen bank and ditch. A complicated pattern of wooden posts was replaced in about 2600 B.C. by 80 dolerite bluestones from Wales that were rearranged at least three times once the larger sarsen stones were added several hundred years later. These huge sandstone blocks, each weighing around 25 tons, were transported some 19 miles (30 kilometers) to create a continuous outer circle with five trilithons (pairs of uprights with a lintel on top) forming a horseshoe within. It's been estimated that it took well over 20 million hours to construct Stonehenge.

Holy Site or Scientific Observatory?

Modern debate over the monument's meaning has two main camps: those who see it as a holy site, and others who believe it represents a scientific observatory. Both camps base their theories on the site's celestial influence, with alignments to the sun and moon taken as evidence of rituals linked to the changing seasons and the summer and winter solstices. Alternatively, alignments identified particularly with stars point to a megalithic calendar used for working out dates or to reflect or predict astronomical events such as solar eclipses.

Recently a radical new theory has emerged-that Stonehenge served as a "prehistoric Lourdes" where people came to be healed. This idea revolves around the smaller bluestones, which, researchers argue, must have been credited with magical powers for them to have been floated, dragged, and hauled 145 miles (233 kilometers) from west Wales. A team lead by Tim Darvill of Bournemouth University, U.K., announced in 2005 that it had located the quarry the bluestones came from, only for another study to suggest the stones had made the journey earlier, powered naturally by ice age glaciers. Excavations at Stonehenge co-directed by Darvill in 2008 bolstered the hypothesis, also based on a number of Bronze Age skeletons unearthed in the area that show signs of bone deformities.

Competing to solve the enduring prehistoric puzzle is Sheffield University's Mike Parker Pearson, co-leader of the Stonehenge Riverside Project, which is partly funded by the National Geographic Society. Discoveries by the project team supported Parker Pearson's claim that Stonehenge was a center for ancestor worship linked by the River Avon and two ceremonial avenues to a matching wooden circle at nearby Durrington Walls. The two circles with their temporary and permanent structures represented, respectively, the domains of the living and the dead, according to Parker Pearson.

"Stonehenge isn't a monument in isolation," he says. "It is actually one of a pair-one in stone, one in timber. The theory is that Stonehenge is a kind of spirit home to the ancestors."

(Read: Stonehenge Was Cemetery First and Foremost, Study Says.)

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Scientists Try to Crack Stonehenge's Prehistoric Puzzles

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Read about Stonehenge and the ongoing efforts to understand who built it and why

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From start to finish, the biggest art heist in modern history lasted just 81 minutes. At 1:24 a.m. on March 18, 1990, two men dressed as police officers walked into Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. They overpowered two unsuspecting night security guards, then duct-taped their victims to a pipe and a workbench in the museum basement.

"Gentlemen, this is a robbery," the criminals announced.

The pair proceeded to remove 13 treasured artworks on display in the lavishly decorated gallery, smashing the protective glass of two Rembrandt paintings and cutting the canvases from their gilded frames. Just over an hour later, the thieves made off with a staggering collection of art that's valued today at $500 million.

Despite a flurry of press attention-and the $10 million reward offered by the museum for the items' safe return-the stolen works have never been recovered. Now, a new Netflix docuseries, " This Is a Robbery: The World's Biggest Art Heist," takes a deep dive into the thorny mysteries surrounding the crime. As Adrian Horton reports for the , the four-part show builds on the reporting of the Boston Globe and WBUR, as well as the FBI's ongoing investigation.

For amateur sleuths and art lovers alike, here are five key things to know about the infamous heist.

Wealthy American art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner constructed her namesake museum out of her private, Venetian palazzo-inspired home in the hope that it would provide " for the education and enjoyment of the public forever." But after her death in 1924, the museum fell into financial disrepair. By 1990, the museum's security flaws were common knowledge among Boston's criminal elite, making it a bit of a "sitting duck" for a heist, per the Guardian.

Late on the night of March 18, the two thieves tricked the young guards on duty, 23-year-old Rick Abath and 25-year-old Randy Hestand, into buzzing them inside. Dressed in stolen police uniforms, the burglars pretended to be cops responding to a disturbance call linked to the rowdy Saint Patrick's Day celebrations taking place outside.

Once inside, the criminals overpowered the hapless guards, disabled the security cameras and got to work removing precious works of art from their frames. The thieves departed at 2:45 a.m. after making two separate trips to their car with the artwork in tow; the night guards, their mouths duct-taped shut, remained trapped in the museum basement until the police, called in by the next set of guards to arrive at the museum, found them around 8:15 a.m.

The thieves made a beeline for some of the museum's greatest treasures, including Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, the only known seascape painted by Rembrandt; A Lady and Gentleman in Black, also by Rembrandt; and Johannes Vermeer's The Concert, one of just dozens of the Dutch Old Master's paintings to survive today. They also picked up a self-portrait sketch by Rembrandt, five sketches by French Impressionist Edgar Degas, a small portrait of a man by Édouard Manet and an ancient Chinese bronze vessel.

Bizarrely, the burglars attempted to remove the flag of Napoleon's Imperial Guard from its frame but failed to do so, instead settling for a bronze, eagle-shaped finial, or ornament. Stranger still, the perpetrators left possibly the most expensive work in the museum untouched: Titian's The Rape of Europa, which was hanging in a third-floor gallery.

Per Robert M. Poole of Smithsonian magazine, the seemingly random assortment of stolen goods has confused authorities and journalists for decades.

"What continues to perplex those investigating the Gardner mystery is that no single motive or pattern seems to emerge from the thousands of pages of evidence gathered over the past 15 years," wrote Poole in 2005. "Were the works taken for love, money, ransom, glory, barter or for some tangled combination of them all?"

Today, museumgoers can visit the Gardner in person or take a virtual tour showing what the thieves left behind: empty frames that hang eerily on the walls as a reminder of the loss.

In 2013, the FBI announced that it had identified the two thieves with a "high degree of confidence." In 2015, the organization revealed the names of its primary suspects: George Reissfelder and Leonard DiMuzio, two associates of the late mobster Carmello Merlino. Both resembled police sketches of the criminals and died within one year of the heist.

The investigators also said that they suspected the art was transported via organized crime networks to Connecticut and the Philadelphia region, where the thieves attempted to sell the works on the black market. After those attempted sales, however, the artworks' trail goes cold.

Authorities were initially suspicious of the two young guards on duty that night. Abath, a self-described hippie and rock guitarist, was a regular on the night shift. Because art crimes of this nature typically require an inside source, he was high on the list of possible conspirators.

Abath, for his part, has long denied any role in the heist, and authorities have generally cleared him as a person of interest, reported Tom Mashberg for the New York Times in 2015.

"I was just this hippie guy who wasn't hurting anything, wasn't on anybody's radar and the next day I was on everybody's radar for the largest art heist in history," he told NPR that same year.

In another wrinkle, Abath's role in the drama once again came under scrutiny in 2015, when the United States Attorney's office in Massachusetts released a rare security camera video. The grainy footage shows Abath, who was on guard during the day of March 17, opening the same side doors used by the thieves and admitting an unidentified man in a waist-length coat and an upturned collar, as the Times reported.

Overall, the museum's security director, Anthony M. Amore, told the Times, the video "raises more questions than it answers."

As the Guardian reports, dozens of theories ranging from conspiratorial to credible have cropped up over the years. Most people, including the FBI, argue that the works traveled through organized crime networks in Boston: namely, the mob.

"This Is a Robbery" is less interested in "whodunnit" and more interested in tracking where the paintings might have ended up. The narrative centers on Bobby Donati, a mobster who may have organized the theft with fellow criminal Robert (Bobby) Guarente in order to use the art as a bargaining chip to get their friend Vincent Ferrara out of jail, per Lauren Kranc of . Both Donati and Guarente are now dead.

Another former mobster, Robert Gentile, has long maintained his innocence despite a bevy of evidence pointing to his involvement in the crime. The octogenarian was released from prison in 2019 after serving 54 months on an unrelated charge. He remains the only living person who likely has firsthand knowledge of the 1990 heist.

The series briefly considers several wilder suggestions, including the theory that members of the Irish Republic Army (IRA) were involved in the crime, notes Esquire. The directors also interviewed Myles Connor Jr., a colorful character and convicted art thief who was in jail at the time of the robbery. Connor provides essential context about how the underground art market operated during the 1990s.

"Researching the case was like learning the game of chess," docuseries director Colin Barnicle tells Town & Country's Norman Vanamee. "The more you know about it, the more options you see."

People with information about the stolen artworks should contact security chief Amore at [email protected] .

The museum is offering a $10 million reward to anyone who provides information leading directly to the safe return of the stolen works. Individuals whose information leads to the restitution of some, but not all, of the works will receive a partial reward. Anyone who helps return the Napoleonic eagle finial will receive a separate $100,000 reward.

Even someone involved in the theft itself can come forward; per the Times, the statute of limitations on the crime has expired.

The Globe and WBUR's investigative podcast " Last Seen " helped publicize the theft upon its debut in 2018. Barnicle says he hopes the new series will bring the plight of the paintings to an even wider audience-with the lingering hope that someone watching might know something new about the art's whereabouts.

"I think if the docuseries doesn't help, then they're gone," Barnicle tells 's Kevin Slane. "This [show] is like the biggest wanted poster in the world."

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Five Things to Know About the Gardner Museum Heist-the Biggest Art Theft in Modern History

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From start to finish, the biggest art heist in modern history lasted just 81 minutes. At 1:24 a.m. on March 18, 1990, two men dressed as police officers walked into Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. They overpowered two unsuspecting night security guards, then duct-taped their victims to a pipe and a workbench in the museum basement.

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When King Tutankhamun died over 3,000 years ago, his body was sealed in a tomb within the Valley of the Kings. It remained buried and untouched until it was unsealed by archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922. There have been rumors since then that Tut's tomb was protected by the curse of the pharaoh, which would take the life of anyone who disturbed Tut's final resting place.

Not long after the tomb was opened, Carter's benefactor Lord Carnarvon suddenly died. This may have given birth to the story of the curse, though it doesn't explain how Carter himself lived nearly two more decades before his death in 1939. The truth of Carnarvon's demise was that he was already in poor health at the time the tomb was opened. Experts have even stated that the sanitary conditions would have been better within the tomb than outside it, meaning that Carnarvon was likely safer when he was within the tomb's walls.

Another potential origin story for the curse is that when Howard Carter and his team made their way through the tomb, they encountered a statue of the god of the dead Anubis standing guard over the Boy King's burial chamber. At the statue's feet was a small brick inscribed with a warning, likely to ward off grave robbers. It is possible that this inscription could have inspired the story of the curse.

Egyptologist Dominic Montserrat had a different theory for the origin - that it came about long before the discovery of Tut's tomb. His research concluded that a likely origin for the myth came after a stage show that removed the wrappings of authentic mummies inspired stories of a curse of mummified bodies out for revenge.

Although the curse itself is only superstition, it lives on in pop culture as a part of King Tut's story.

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The Curse of King Tut's Tomb | Beyond King Tut

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Was King Tut's Tomb protected by the curse of the pharaoh? Find out about the mysterious circumstances surrounding the discovery of the tomb.

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On November 7, 1872, the 282-ton brigantine Mary Celeste set sail from New York Harbor on its way to Genoa, Italy. On board were the ship's captain, Benjamin S. Briggs, his wife, Sarah, and their 2-year-old daughter, Sophia, along with eight crewmembers. Less than a month later, on December 5, a passing British ship called Dei Gratia spotted the Mary Celeste at full sail and adrift about 400 miles east of the Azores, with no sign of the captain, his family or any of the crew. Aside from several feet of water in the hold and a missing lifeboat, the ship was undamaged and loaded with six months' worth of food and water.

Mary Celeste had a shadowy past. Originally christened Amazon, it was given a new name after a series of mishaps (including the sudden illness and death of its first captain and a collision with another ship in the English Channel). An investigation into whether to grant payment by its insurers to the Dei Gratia's crew for salvaging the "ghost ship" found no evidence of foul play. Mary Celeste would sail under different owners for 12 years before its last captain deliberately ran it aground in Haiti as part of an attempted insurance fraud.

In 2001, best-selling novelist and adventurer Clive Cussler claimed to have found the wreck of Mary Celeste, but later analysis of the timbers retrieved from the ship he found showed the wood was still living at least a decade after Mary Celeste sank.

Meanwhile, one of the most famous maritime mysteries in history endures: Why would an experienced captain such as Briggs, or his sailors, abandon a perfectly sound ship? Theories over the years have ranged from mutiny and pirate attack to assault by giant octopus or sea monster, while the more scientifically minded proposed an explosion caused by fumes from the 1,700 barrels of crude alcohol in the ship's hold.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle even weighed in with a short story published in 1884, in which the inhabitants of the ghost ship fell victim to an ex-slave seeking vengeance. On the less-sensationalized end, an investigation chronicled in the 2007 documentary "The True Story of the Mary Celeste" was able to offer no definite conclusion, but did suggest a scenario in which a faulty chronometer, rough seas and a clogged onboard pump could have led Briggs to order the ship abandoned shortly after sighting land on November 25, 1872.

According to the last entry in the ship's log book, made that morning, Mary Celeste was within sight of the Azores island of Santa Maria, some 500 miles from where the Dei Gratia would find it nine days later.

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On November 7, 1872, the 282-ton brigantine Mary Celeste set sail from New York Harbor on its way to Genoa, Italy. On board were the ship's captain, Benjamin S. Briggs, his wife, Sarah, and their 2-year-old daughter, Sophia, along with eight crewmembers. Less than a month later, on December 5, a passing British ship called [...]

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Illuminati, designation in use from the 15th century, assumed by or applied to various groups of persons who claimed to be unusually enlightened. The word is the plural of the Latin illuminatus ("revealed" or "enlightened").

illuminati; Adam Weishaupt Historia Collection/Shutterstock.com

What does the name illuminati refer to?

What are the origins of the illuminati?

What was the Bavarian illuminati group?

Who are some notable members of illuminati groups?

Early illuminati

According to adherents, the source of the "light" was viewed as being directly communicated from a higher source or due to a clarified and exalted condition of the human intelligence. To the former class belong the Alumbrados (Spanish: "enlightened") of Spain. Spanish historian Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo first finds the name about 1492 (in the form aluminados, 1498) but traces them back to a gnostic origin and thinks their views were promoted in Spain through influences from Italy. One of their earliest leaders-indeed, some scholars style her as a "pre-Alumbrado"-was María de Santo Domingo, who came to be known as La Beata de Piedrahita. She was a labourer's daughter, born in Aldeanueva, south of Salamanca, about 1485. She joined the Dominican order as a teenager and soon achieved renown as a prophet and mystic who could converse directly with Jesus Christ and the Virgin. Ferdinand of Aragon invited her to his court, and he became convinced of the sincerity of her visions. The Dominicans appealed to Pope Julius II for guidance, and a series of trials were convened under the auspices of the Inquisition. Her patrons, which by then included not only Ferdinand but also Francisco Cardenal Jiménez de Cisneros and the duke of Alba, ensured that no decision was taken against her, and she was cleared in 1510.

St. Ignatius of Loyola, while studying at Salamanca (1527), was brought before an ecclesiastical commission on a charge of sympathy with the Alumbrados, but he escaped with an admonition. Others were not so fortunate. In 1529 a congregation of unlettered adherents at Toledo was visited with scourging and imprisonment. Greater rigours followed, and for about a century the Alumbrados afforded many victims to the Inquisition, especially at Córdoba.

St. Ignatius of Loyola Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

The movement (under the name of Illuminés) seems to have reached France from Seville in 1623. It attained some prominence in Picardy when joined (1634) by Pierre Guérin, curé of Saint-Georges de Roye, whose followers, known as Guerinets, were suppressed in 1635. Another body of Illuminés surfaced in the south of France in 1722 and appears to have lingered till 1794, having affinities with those known contemporaneously as "French Prophets," an offshoot of the Protestant militant Camisards.

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Of a different class were the Rosicrucians, who claimed to have originated in 1422 but achieved public notice in 1537. Their teachings combined something of Egyptian Hermetism, Christian gnosticism, Jewish Kabbala, alchemy, and a variety of other occult beliefs and practices. The earliest extant writing which mentions the Rosicrucian order was the Fama Fraternitatis, first published in 1614 but probably circulated in manuscript form somewhat earlier than this. It recounts the journey of the reputed founder of the movement, Christian Rosenkreuz, to Damascus, Damcar (a legendary hidden city in Arabia), Egypt, and Fès, where he was well received and came into possession of much secret wisdom. He returned finally to Germany, where he chose three others to whom he imparted this wisdom and thus founded the order. Later the number was increased to eight, who separated, each going to a separate country. One of the six articles of agreement they adopted was that the fraternity should remain secret for 100 years. At the end of 120 years the secret burial place and the perfectly preserved body of the founder were discovered by one of the then members of the order, along with certain documents and symbols held in very high esteem by Rosicrucians. The sacred vault was re-covered, the members of the order dispersed, and the location of the vault was lost to history. The Fama ends with an invitation to "some few" to join the fraternity. Among those believed to have been associated with the order were German alchemist Michael Maier, British physician Robert Fludd, and British philosopher and statesman Sir Francis Bacon.

Perhaps the group most closely associated with the name illuminati was a short-lived movement of republican free thought founded on May Day 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, professor of canon law at Ingolstadt and a former Jesuit. The members of this secret society called themselves "Perfectibilists." Their founder's aim was to replace Christianity with a religion of reason, as later did the revolutionaries of France and the 19th-century positivist philosopher Auguste Comte. The order was organized along Jesuit lines and kept internal discipline and a system of mutual surveillance based on that model. Its members pledged obedience to their superiors and were divided into three main classes: the first included "novices," "minervals," and "lesser illuminati"; the second consisted of freemasons ("ordinary," "Scottish," and "Scottish knights"); and the third or "mystery" class comprised two grades of "priest" and "regent" as well as "magus" and "king."

Beginning with a narrow circle of disciples carefully selected from among his own students, Weishaupt gradually extended his recruitment efforts from Ingolstadt to Eichstätt, Freising, Munich, and elsewhere, with special attention being given to the enlistment of young men of wealth, rank, and social importance. From 1778 onward Weishaupt's illuminati began to make contact with various Masonic lodges, where, under the impulse of Adolf Franz Friedrich, Freiherr von Knigge, one of their chief converts, they often managed to gain a commanding position, It was to Knigge that the society was indebted for the extremely elaborate constitution (never, however, actually realized) as well as its internal communication system. Each member of the order had given him a special name, generally classical, by which he alone was addressed in official writing (Weishaupt was referred to as Spartacus while Knigge was Philo). All internal correspondence was conducted in cipher, and to increase the mystification, towns and provinces were invested with new and altogether arbitrary designations.

At its period of greatest development, Weishaupt's "Bavarian Illuminati" included in its operations a very wide area, extending from Italy to Denmark and from Warsaw to Paris; at no time, however, do its numbers appear to have exceeded 2,000. The order and its doctrines appealed to literary giants such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Gottfried von Herder as well as the dukes Ernest II of Gotha and Charles Augustus of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. Such notables were claimed as members although it is questionable if they were actually so. Weishaupt's illuminati were believed to have included astronomer Johann Bode, writer and bookseller Friedrich Nicolai, philosopher Friedrich Jacobi, and poet Friedrich Leopold, Graf zu Stolberg-Stolberg.

Secret societies of this kind fitted in with the idea of benevolent despotism as a vehicle for the Enlightenment, as Goethe shows in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. The movement suffered from internal dissension and was ultimately banned by an edict of the Bavarian government in 1785. Some members were imprisoned, while others were driven from their homes. Weishaupt was stripped of his chair at Ingolstadt and banished from Bavaria. After 1785 the historical record contains no further activities of Weishaupt's illuminati, but the order figured prominently in conspiracy theories for centuries after its disbanding. It was credited with activities ranging from the instigation of the French Revolution to the assassination of U.S. Pres. John F. Kennedy, and the notion of an all-knowing cabal of ancient masters remained a powerful image in the popular consciousness into the 21st century.

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The modern conspiracy theories surrounding the illuminati were first popularized by Robert Wilson and Kerry Thornley through fictional works and fake letters to magazines in the 1960s.

The group most closely associated with the name "illuminati" was formed in Bavaria in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, who wanted an alternative to the Freemasons for intellectuals and influential figures.

The organization was banned in 1785, and during enforcement of the ban, authorities found documents that defended suicide and atheism, as well as instructions for abortions.

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illuminati | Facts, History, Suppression, & Conspiracy

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Illuminati, designation in use from the 15th century, assumed by or applied to various groups of persons who claimed to be unusually enlightened. The word is the plural of the Latin illuminatus ('revealed' or 'enlightened'). Learn more about the history of the illuminati in this article.

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It's the only unsolved hijacking case in the history of commercial aviation. On the afternoon of November 24, 1971-Thanksgiving Eve-a man aboard a flight from Portland to Seattle threatened to detonate a bomb if he didn't receive a hefty ransom. Once he got the money, the hijacker released all passengers and ordered the crew to fly to Mexico. En route, with cash in hand, the man parachuted from the aircraft.

This man was known as D.B. Cooper. After a 45-year FBI investigation, his identity, whereabouts and motive remain unknown. No one even knows whether he survived the jump-and one of the prime suspects died in 2019.
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The FBI Account

The FBI's extensive record on D.B. Cooper describe him as a "white male, 6'1" tall, 170-175 pounds, age-mid-forties, olive complexion, brown eyes, black hair, conventional cut, parted on left." Cooper boarded Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305, he settled in his aisle seat at the rear of the 727, lit a cigarette, and ordered a bourbon and soda. Then he handed a note to Florence Schaffner, a 23-year-old flight attendant. "I have a bomb in my briefcase," it read. "I want you to sit next to me."

Schaffner did as instructed. Cooper told her the rest of his demands: $200,000 and four parachutes, delivered on landing at Sea-Tac Airport. While police and airline staff on the ground scrambled to assemble the money and chutes, the pilots flew in circles above Seattle. Passengers were told that a minor mechanical issue had forced the plane to burn fuel, prolonging a flight that would normally take 30 minutes.

After three-and-a-half hours in the air, the 727 finally landed. Having received his money and parachutes, Cooper dismissed all 36 passengers and two of the six crew members. The plane refueled and took off for Cooper's next requested destination: Mexico, via Reno and Yuma to refuel. During the first leg, with the crew in the cockpit, Cooper lowered the rear stairs and parachuted into a thunderstorm. He has never been found.

The FBI followed thousands of leads to find Cooper, considering more than 800 suspects in the five years following the incident. Below are some men who have been considered suspects.

Richard McCoy, Jr.

AP Photo

On April 7, 1972, a man traveling under a fake name boarded a Newark-Los Angeles flight. Shortly after take-off he handed a note to one of the flight attendants. The note demanded $500,000 and four parachutes. If these were not furnished, the man, a seasoned skydiver and helicopter pilot, would bomb the plane. The 727 landed and refueled, the hijacker exchanged passengers for cash and parachutes, and, en route to the next destination, he jumped from the rear stairs to freedom. Sound familiar?

This hijacking occurred less than five months after the D.B. Cooper incident, leading many to suspect that the same culprit may have been responsible. The perpetrator of the April crime, Richard McCoy, Jr., was convicted of air piracy and received a 45-year prison sentence. On August 10, 1974, however, he and some fellow inmates hijacked a garbage truck and escaped their Pennsylvania penitentiary. When the FBI finally tracked McCoy down in Virginia three months later, a shoot-out left him dead.

Sheridan Peterson

A more under-the-radar suspect through the years has been Sheridan Peterson, who fell under suspicion within a week of the skyjacking, but wasn't interviewed by the FBI until decades later. Peterson, a former Boeing employee, worked in the department that wrote the flight manual for the Boeing 727 jet that was hijacked-a familiarity that might explain how the perpetrator knew the aircraft had back stairs he could open and jump from. An accomplished skydiver, Peterson worked for a time as a smokejumper in Montana. He also worked at the Issaquah Skydive Center in the early 1960s-the same place that would later provide parachutes used by Cooper in his escape.

Unlike descriptions of Cooper, however, Peterson has blue eyes, not brown. And while Cooper had chain-smoked on the flight, Peterson is not known to have been a smoker. At the time of the hijacking, Peterson told authorities, he was living with his wife and family in Nepal, although he offered no definitive proof that he hadn't traveled back at the time of the hijacking.

Robert Rackstraw

Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Back in the 1970s, pilot and former paratrooper Robert Rackstraw had a whole lot going on. Grand theft, $75,000 worth of bad checks, and the possible murder of his stepfather were just a few of the infractions for which authorities nabbed him. After being acquitted of the murder charge, Rackstraw saw fit to fake his own death in 1978 by logging a false mayday call from a rented plane in northern California. He spent two years in prison for check fraud and theft of an aircraft.

In the 2016 book The Last Master Outlaw, authors Thomas J. Colbert and Tom Szollosi presented evidence gathered during a five-year investigation into Rackstraw's past. They concluded he was the legendary hijacker, a claim Rackstraw's lawyer called "the stupidest thing I've ever heard." Rackstraw died from a heart condition on July 9, 2019.

Kenneth Christiansen

Kenneth Christiansen had a more direct link to the Cooper incident: he had worked for Northwest-the hijacked airline-as a mechanic, flight attendant and purser. Kenneth's brother Lyle claims that when Kenneth was on his death bed in 1994, he said, "There is something you should know, but I cannot tell you!"

Kenneth had been a military paratrooper. The year after the D.B. Cooper hijacking, despite being on a modest flight attendant's salary, he bought a house in cash.

Clues in the D.B. Cooper Case

Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Cannily, Cooper had taken his ransom note back from the flight attendant, so investigators were unable to examine it. Cooper did leave a few traces behind, though: some cigarette butts, a hair on the headrest of his seat and a clip-on necktie, which he tore from his collar before hurtling himself from the plane. Unfortunately, the FBI could not get any fingerprints from the items.

Though it was initially believed that Cooper was a battle-scarred skydiver-perhaps a paratrooper-further analysis found that he was likely no expert. "No experienced parachutist would have jumped in the pitch-black night, in the rain, with a 200-mile-an-hour wind in his face, wearing loafers and a trench coat," said FBI Special Agent Larry Carr in 2007. Investigators also thought Cooper acted alone. If he had worked with an accomplice, he would have requested a much more specific flight path rather than saying "Fly to Mexico" and jumping out when visibility was poor.

In 1980, a child's discovery reignited interest in the mystery. Eight-year-old Brian Ingram was digging in the sand on the banks of Washington's Columbia River when he found a bundle of rotting $20 bills totaling $5,800. When his parents contacted the police, they learned the serial numbers on the cash matched those from the stash given to D.B. Cooper. Aside from the few items left behind on the plane, this is the only material evidence found from the hijacking. Six years after he discovered the money, Ingram was allowed to keep $2,760 of it. In 2008 he sold 15 of the fragmented $20 bills at auction for $37,433.38.

In the wake of the hijacking, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered that "Cooper vanes," named after the elusive D.B., must be installed in all Boeing 727 aircraft. A Cooper vane is a small latch fitted to the outside of all planes with rear stairs. The latch prevents anyone from opening the door mid-flight, just as D.B. Cooper did as he leaped into the air-and vanished into obscurity.

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It's the only unsolved hijacking case in the history of commercial aviation. On the afternoon of November 24, 1971-Thanksgiving Eve-a man aboard a flight from Portland to Seattle threatened to detonate a bomb if he didn't receive a hefty ransom. Once he got the money, the hijacker released all passengers and ordered the crew to fly to Mexico.