In July 1947, a U.S. Army spokesman in Roswell, New Mexico, issued a press release to announce that the military had found a “flying disc” that had landed at a ranch near an air base. “It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field,” according to the army, “and subsequently loaned to higher headquarters.” There were no further public statements about the matter.
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In 1882 the nawab of Bahawalpur ordered a bed from a Parisian manufacturer that included four life-size bronze gurines of naked women with natural hair and movable eyes and arms, holding fans and horsetails. Wires were arranged so downward pressure on the mattress set the gures in motion, fanning and winking at him, while a selection from Gounod’s opera Faust played from a built-in music box.
According to one theory, the association between storks and human infants in northern European folklore arose from an ancient Germanic custom of holding weddings on the summer solstice, before storks began their annual migration to Africa. Nine months later, when the babies conceived the previous summer were being born, the storks would return north to breed.
“Today is my eighteenth birthday!” Alexandrina Victoria wrote in her journal on May 24, 1837. Less than a month later, she was awoken at six o’clock and informed she was queen of the United Kingdom. “I am very young and perhaps in many, though not in all things, inexperienced,” she noted that day, “but I am sure that very few have more real goodwill and more real desire to do what is fit and right than I have.” Her reign, at 63 years and 216 days, is the second longest of the British monarchy.
Kings of England extorted money from their subjects in taxes concealed as gifts—a practice first used in 1473 by Edward IV. These were known as benevolences.
On July 13, 1793, a Girondist young woman stabbed to death the Montagnard Jean-Paul Marat, editor of The Friend of the People. The state funeral was arranged by Jacques-Louis David, who soon afterward painted his Death of Marat; every member of the National Convention came, and the Marquis de Sade delivered the eulogy.
In 1980 seven members of Congress were caught up in the Abscam bribery scandal after an FBI sting. Florida congressman Richard Kelly was caught on surveillance camera stuffing $25,000 in cash into his pockets. “Does it show?” Kelly asked an undercover FBI agent dressed as a sheikh. Only one congressman refused the proffered bribe. “Wait a minute,” said Senator Larry Pressler of South Dakota. “What you are suggesting may be illegal.”
“Were it possible that the sea could be drained of its waters and emptied by some extraordinary accident, what incredible numbers, what infinite variety of uncommon and amazing sea monsters would exhibit themselves to our view, which are now entirely unknown!” wrote Reverend Erich Pontoppidan in his Natural History of Norway, published in 1753. Ninety-five percent of the ocean remains unseen by humankind, and it is believed that up to sixty-five percent of its plant and animal life has not yet been undiscovered.
In the days after a July 1917 German air raid on London that killed forty civilians, Harry Gordon Selfridge, the American-born owner of Selfridges department store, took out ads declaring he would award $5,000 of life insurance on behalf of anyone killed by such an attack while shopping at his store. His building, he noted, was made out of concrete.
While aboard a ship on which a fire broke out, Ivan Turgenev as a boy in 1838 is purported to have shouted in alarm, “Save me, save me, I am my mother’s only son.”
A 52-million-year-old fossilized tomatillo found in January 2017 revealed the fruit to be five times older than scientists had previously thought. “The initial discovery was a very big OMG moment,” said paleobotanist Peter Wilf. “I was like, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Could it be? Could it be? Could it be? Really? Really? Really?’ Then I just went nuts.”
The Hungarian American physicist Leo Szilard first conceived of the nuclear chain reaction—a crucial milestone in the development of the atomic bomb—on a gray London morning in September 1933 while waiting for a traffic light to change from red to green. “It suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element…which would emit two neutrons when it absorbed one neutron,” he wrote, this element could “liberate energy on an industrial scale, and construct atomic bombs.” In his book on the history of the bomb, historian Richard Rhodes writes that “as he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world.”
According to a study by the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute published in 2013, there are in the U.S. around 84 million cats with owners and between 30 and 80 million feral cats, most of which are hunters. The Institute estimates that felines in the latter group kill between 1.4 and 3.7 billion birds a year and around 15 billion mammals.
A 2001 study in Science magazine found that matriarchal African elephants are essential to the well-being of elephant social groups because they possess social memories that enable them to recognize if outsiders are friendly to the herd. “Elephants can certainly build up a memory over the years and hold on to it,” said the study’s lead author.
In her account of tenth-century Kyoto court life, The Pillow Book, Sei Shōnagon was fond of making lists. “Things later regretted: an adopted child who turns out to have an ugly face”; “Things it’s frustrating and embarrassing to witness: someone insists on telling you about some horrid little child, carried away with her own infatuation with the creature, imitating its voice as she gushes about the cute and winning things it says”; “Moving things: a child dressed in mourning for a parent.”