8.
The Octavius Ghost Ship
According to legend, the Octavius was a ghost ship that was found off Greenland’s west
coast in 1775.
The story claims that a five-man crew of another vessel called the Herald saw the derelict
ship and went aboard to assess the situation.
Below deck, they discovered Octavius’s 28-man crew – dead, frozen, and perfectly preserved.
The captain supposedly died sitting at a table in his cabin, with pen in hand and his logbook
in front of him.
The bodies of a woman, a boy beneath a blanket, and a sailor with a tinderbox lay nearby.
Unwilling to search the vessel, the boarding party grabbed the logbook and disembarked.
The logbook’s last entry was dated November 11, 1762 – nearly 13 years earlier.
According to the logbook, Octavius had reached the Orient in 1762 after leaving England the
previous year.
For the return voyage, the captain ordered the crew to sail through the Northwest Passage,
a treacherous and frigid sea route through the Arctic Ocean that serves as a connection
between the Pacific and Atlantic.
This would perhaps explain why the ship’s crew met such a tragic end.
But Octavius was never seen again after the Herald crew supposedly found it and its logbook
disappeared long ago.
Consequently, many modern historians have written the entire story off as a myth.
7.
Tunguska Event
The largest impact event in the world’s recorded history happened on the morning of
June 30, 1908 when a region of eastern Siberia was rocked by a ~12 megaton explosion.
Known as the Tunguska Event, the blast flattened an estimated 80 million trees over a 830-square-mile
(2,150 km2) section of forest.
Only three people died, according to witness reports, owing to the area’s remote location.
The earth was lucky this time!
Mineralogist Leonid Kulik led the first attempted expedition to the site in 1921, but harsh
weather forced the team to turn back.
They reached it on their second try in 1927 and discovered the destroyed trees laying
on their sides in an outward radial pattern spreading from the epicenter.
Locals were initially reluctant to discuss the event with Kulik’s team.
When they were finally willing to talk, they described seeing a blueish, extremely bright
fireball soaring across the sky, followed by a flash and a loud explosion.
The shockwave reportedly knocked residents off their feet, shattered their windows, and
killed reindeer.
Scientists think that the explosion was caused by a meteoroid exploding in mid-flight as
it hit the Earth’s atmosphere.
Based on the damage, it would have measured between 160 and 200 feet (50-60 meters) long,
and was likely traveling at a speed of around 16.8 miles per second (27 km/s).
It’s believed that the rock heated up to 45,500 degrees Fahrenheit (25,260 Celsius)
and blew up between three and six miles (5-10 km) in the sky, and that it never actually
hit the Earth.
The blast released the equivalent of 185 Hiroshima bombs.
But no impact crater was ever found, and there’s no definitive proof that a meteoroid caused
the massive blast.
So no one can say for sure that this is even what happened.
What researchers do know is that if an explosion this big happened in a populated area, it
could easily wipe out an entire major city and its outskirts.
Experts estimate that an asteroid the size of the one they believe was involved in the
Tunguska Event falls to the earth once every 300 to 1,000 years.
There have been much larger impacts, but they happened during prehistoric times, before
humans kept records of such things, and before we even existed in the first place.
6.
The Dancing Plague
Out of nowhere one day in 1518, residents of Strasbourg, in modern-day France, began
dancing uncontrollably.
They continued dancing for days on end, and more and more people joined in the chaos.
Historical records describe how a woman named Mrs. Troffea started dancing wildly in the
street.
It had a contagious effect on locals, particularly young women.
At the height of the so-called “dancing plague,” around 400 people were busting
a move.
But they weren’t having a fun time.
They were in severe discomfort, and their strange, constant movements were exhausting.
Many people landed themselves in the hospital, and rumor has it that as many as 15 dancers
died daily when the bizarre sickness was at its worst.
Doctors determined that the dancers were not possessed, even if they were acting like it,
but that they were suffering from overheated blood.
Lacking solutions besides putting people in the hospital, local officials built a wooden
stage for the afflicted to use to get the dancing out of their system.
Thankfully, the behavior seemed to subside on its own after about three months.
To this day, experts are unsure of what caused the dancing plague.
They think that it could have been mushroom poisoning or some other physical condition,
or that it may have been a widespread psychiatric illness known as mass hysteria.
This is a phenomenon that occurs when a large number of people subscribe to an idea without
thinking critically about a matter.
It’s often driven by widespread fear and paranoia.
The mass hysteria theory makes sense.
At the time, the Alsace region suffered from widespread disease and starvation, and its
residents were known for being superstitious.
It’s not surprising, then, that this is just one of at least seven documented cases
of dancing plagues happening there throughout the Middle Ages.
And now for a very mysterious boy, but first wanted to give a big shout out to
CAROLE FREEMAN and
Eduan Mong
Thanks so much for watching and supporting Origins Explained!
Be sure to subscribe if you haven’t already and join the family!!
5.
Kaspar Hauser
A teenage boy appeared on the streets of Nuremberg, Germany one day in 1828 with an anonymous
letter in hand.
It stated that the boy had come into the person’s custody as an infant, and that the guardian
had never allowed him to leave the house.
Not even once.
Another letter in the youth’s possession identified him as Kaspar Hauser and claimed
that the boy’s father was a cavalryman who had died.
While he appeared to be physically healthy, the boy seemed mentally impaired.
Because Hauser provided no backstory about himself, police imprisoned him as a vagabond.
Many people assumed that he was a feral child who had spent much of his life in the woods.
He eventually opened up about his past, claiming that he spent his entire childhood confined
to a dungeon, alone.
Hauser described his living quarters as a tiny cell with a straw bed.
He said that he was given just two simple toys to play with and received only rye bread
and water for nourishment.
The boy supposedly came face-to-face with another human for the first time shortly before
his release, when a man visited his cell and taught him how to write his name.
The visitor concealed his face the entire time.
Locals supported Hauser financially, and he was taken under the wing of a schoolmaster.
By all appearances, the boy thrived later in life, although he was the target of several
attempted murders.
He was stabbed to death in 1833, five years after being discovered.
Nobody ever figured out who Hauser really was or where he came from.
To make matters worse, inconsistencies in his stories proved that he was a liar, making
it even more difficult to distinguish fact from fiction.
Where do you think Kaspar Hauser really came from?
Let me know your theories in the comments below!
4.
The Great Vowel Shift
During the Middle Ages, British speakers dramatically changed the pronunciation of the English language.
Known as the “Great Vowel Shift,” this period of transformation began around the
year 1400 in southern England and continued until 1700.
Throughout the process, the sound of all Middle English long vowels and some consonants became
so different, it had long-lasting implications for things like spelling, learning how to
read, and understanding English texts from before or during the period.
Experts can’t seem to agree on what caused the Great Vowel Shift.
In their attempts to figure it out, they look toward the 15th and 16th centuries, when the
biggest changes happened.
In the aftermath of the Black Death, people migrated rapidly from northern England to
the southeastern part of the country.
Some scholars believe that this may have caused a mixture of accents that brought on broader
changes in the way of speaking.
Other researchers theorize that the shift resulted from French words being incorporated
into the English language.
On a similar note, the middle classes developed a tendency to apply French pronunciation to
English words.
This stemmed from the English aristocracy’s decision to switch from French to English.
Consequently, the Great Vowel Shift could have been caused by people overcorrecting
their speech in a misguided attempt to sound more French.
On the other hand, this hypercorrection may have resulted from anti-French sentiments
prompting people to try sounding less French.
But the plain and simple truth is that nobody really knows what led people to speak so differently
that the English language sounds nothing like it used to.
3.
Who Were the Sea Peoples?
Civilization began spreading rapidly throughout the eastern Mediterranean over 3,000 years
ago.
The area was home to numerous advanced ancient cultures, including the Egyptians, Hittites,
Greeks, and Minoans.
During the Late Bronze Age collapse between 1200 and 900 B.C., a mysterious group known
only as the Sea Peoples supposedly terrorized the region, wreaking havoc on the Egyptians
and other societies.
But their identity remains a mystery to this day.
This ruthless seafaring group did not leave behind any monuments or written records.
Knowledge of their existence is based solely on inscriptions left behind by the cultures
they ravaged.
One 13th-century carving describes a tribe of naval warriors that no local population
stood a chance of defeating.
Based on the lack of mentionings of the Sea Peoples’ origins, it seems as though the
Egyptians knew where they came from.
In other words, this information was probably common knowledge, so ancient writers saw no
need to discuss it.
Either way, none of the ancient texts about the Sea Peoples talk about their roots, leaving
modern-day scholars to try answering this question on their own.
The Egyptians described the group as “Northerners,” suggesting that they may have come from Turkey,
Sicily, or elsewhere in Europe.
Some researchers have even theorized that the Sea Peoples were the Philistines, who
were famously mentioned in the Bible for going to war with the ancient Israelites.
In addition to not knowing where the civilization came from, experts have no idea what triggered
them to abandon their homeland and adopt a lifestyle of raiding societies throughout
the Mediterranean.
2.
Benjaman Kyle
One day in August 2004, a Burger King employee found an unconscious middle-aged man by the
restaurant’s dumpster in Richmond Hill, Georgia.
He was naked, sunburned, covered in red ant bites, and had indentations in his head from
blunt force trauma.
The man was rushed to the hospital, where he became known as the “Burger King Doe”
because he didn’t have any ID on him.
He didn’t know his name, claimed to have no idea how he ended up in Georgia, and was
unable to think of a single person he knew.
The confused patient, who called himself Benjaman Kyle, ended up in a care facility for poor
and homeless people.
Nurses routinely tried to help him get his memory back, but nothing he came up with led
to his identity.
Years went by, and fingerprints, DNA tests, and facial recognition technology failed to
determine who he was.
No one recognized his picture on TV.
The mystery was finally solved in 2015 by a team of genetic genealogists.
Using a process of elimination similar to how they help adopted people find their birth
families, they compared Benjaman Kyle’s DNA to information from records databases
across the country.
His real name is William Burgess Powell.
He’s from Indiana, and had cut ties with his family back in 1976 before abandoning
his car, home, and other belongings and disappearing.
Police found him living in Colorado, but soon enough, Powell had fallen off the radar again.
His name disappeared from job records and other official documents after 1983.
Naturally, Powell’s family was stunned to hear that he was alive.
But they welcomed him back to Indiana with open arms, and he’s rebuilt his life in
the hometown he doesn’t really remember.
While it’s great that Powell has finally learned who he is, no one knows what went
on during the decades-long gap between his disappearance and when he was found outside
Burger King.
He doesn’t remember, and there’s no real way of knowing if those memories will ever
return.
1.
The WOW!
Signal
On August 15, 1977, the Big Ear Radio telescope at Ohio State University detected a mysterious
signal coming from the direction of the Sagittarius constellation.
Known as the “WOW!” signal, the 72-second radio burst was 30 times more powerful than
the region’s typical background radiation.
Simply put, it seemed alien in nature, and some saw it as evidence that life exists outside
our planet.
It got its nickname after astronomer Jerry Ehman scribbled the word “WOW!” on a printout
of the signal.
Although researchers were able to determine the relative area that it originated from,
they failed to pinpoint its exact location or what caused it.
They ruled out several causes, including glitches and known natural sources such as highly magnetic
rotating stars called pulsars.
The signal’s frequency was measured at 1420 Megahertz, which is the same frequency that
hydrogen emits.
This discovery further bolstered the theory that
the WOW!
Signal came from an artificial source – in other words, from aliens.
But not all experts agree that the signal’s origins are extraterrestrial.
Some think that there might be a rational explanation for it, and that there are probably
natural causes behind it such as hydrogen clouds or a star.
In 2017, a team of scientists discovered new evidence about what may have caused the WOW!
Signal.
They found that at the time the signal was intercepted,
two comets were passing through the same region in the sky.
This could not only explain the signal itself, but also why the signal never repeated.
The comets moved on in their orbits, so it would naturally be a one-time occurrence.
But, as plausible as this theory may seem, it remains unproven for now.
Thanks for watching!
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Bye for now!