8 Things No One Can Explain By Justin Dodd
In April 2010, a teenager in Croatia woke up from a mysterious 24 hour coma, much to
her family’s relief. But then a strange thing happened: The 13-year old girl couldn’t
speak to her parents in her native Croatian. While she was still able to understand the
language, she could only respond in inexplicably fluent German, a language she had only just
begun studying in school. She required a translator to be able to communicate with her family,
and doctors remained… stumped.
Hi I’m Erin McCarthy, editor in chief of MentalFloss.com, and this is The List Show,
from my living room. The case of this mysterious Croatian-German language swap is not the only
example of brain injuries leading to unexplainable language phenomena. In 2013 an Australian
man woke up from a car crash speaking perfect Mandarin. In 2016, a teenager from Atlanta
woke up from a coma speaking fluent Spanish, and had such trouble speaking his native English
that he would have a seizure every time he tried.
Doctors and scientists cannot fully explain these events. The role of language development
in the brain is such a dynamic field that our ideas have probably changed as I finished
saying this sentence. Scientists generally presume it’s important that all of the examples
I listed had some knowledge of their new language, but it’s still unknown why this phenomenon
can affect certain people so drastically.
Waking from a coma speaking a foreign language is just one of many unexplainable things that
I’m going to share with you today.
On June 30th, 1908, a massive explosion decimated a forest in Siberia near the Podkamennaya
Tunguska River. A fireball believed to have been up to 100 meters wide erupted in the
sky, flattening some 80 million trees and killing hundreds of reindeer. It was so intense
that residents in the nearest town, which was about 35 miles away, felt the heat of
the explosion. One eyewitness recounted:
“The sky was split in two, and high above the forest the whole northern part of the
sky appeared covered with fire … At that moment there was a band in the sky and a mighty
crash … The crash was followed by a noise like stones falling from the sky, or of guns
firing.”
All in all, the explosion, which has come to be known as the Tunguska Event, is said
to have produced about 185 times more energy than the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.
With an event of this size and intensity, you would expect the source to be pretty obvious.
But over a hundred years later, scientists still haven’t figured out what caused it.
The most common explanation at the time was some sort of meteoroid. The trouble was, there
was no impact crater, and little evidence of any kind of extraterrestrial object in
the surrounding area. Some scientists later concluded it was a comet that had entered
our atmosphere, which are largely made of ice and therefore wouldn’t have left behind
obvious rock fragments.
A 1958 expedition to the area found some promising globules—which are the best kind of globules—pointing
toward a meteoritic origin. This might have put the Tunguska mystery to rest, but scientists
still weren’t convinced. A 1973 paper suggested that a black hole had collided with the earth,
which led to the massive explosion. This was… quickly disputed. Further studies seem to
imply that the explosion was indeed some kind of meteoric explosion, but a truly definitive
conclusion has yet to be found. Theories of UFO crashes or nuclear explosions still persist.
The Tunguska Event isn’t the only mysterious thing that has happened in Siberia. There’s
another unexplainable thing hidden among the trees in the Irkutsk region: Patom crater,
otherwise known as Fire Eagle Nest, is a large rock formation in southeastern Siberia. The
crater is about 520 feet in diameter and 130 feet in height, with a ring-shaped crown.
It was discovered in 1949 by a geologist named Vadim Kolpakov, but it’s probably about
350 years old.
The region is home to the Yakuts, a Turkic group who have habited the area for generations.
According to Yakut legend, the crater is an evil place. Not even deer dare to go near
it. When Kolpakov discovered it, he noted, quote,
“From a distance it looked like a mine-shaft slagheap, only whitish. I even thought, 'Where
are the people?' There were no labour camps in the area. Unless a very, very secret one?”
According to the Tomsk Science Center, with help from Google Translate, he adds, “But
then I would not have been sent to geo-prospect this area, but, on the contrary, would have
been offered to stay away from here. My second thought was an archaeological artifact. But
the local Evenks and Yakuts, with my respect for them, are not the ancient Egyptians. They
could not build stone pyramids, and didn't have any human resources nor the necessary
scientific knowledge."
Not unlike the Tunguska Event, scientists initially tried to explain the craters as
the result of some sort of extraterrestrial impact. Some, however, think it might be the
result of natural gas bursting through the surface of the earth. There has been so much
speculation about the formation in the geologic world that, in 2010, there was an entire conference
dedicated to it, appropriately called the Patom Crater Conference. The conference participants
reached a consensus: in their estimation, the Patom Crater was not the result of any
meteorite. They suggested that it had been created by some sort of geological process,
but at this time, that explanation is still just an educated guess.
When scientists want to study a new drug, they'll often test it in comparison to a placebo,
such as a sugar pill. At minimum, a drug needs to produce better results than a control such
as the placebo to be considered effective. Strangely, though, the placebos themselves
can often produce changes in test subjects, even though there's no physiological mechanism
to account for the change. The real, measurable impact from what is essentially a "fake" treatment
is known as the placebo effect.
The idea of a placebo has been around since at least the 18th century, but scientists
don’t fully understand it. They know that the brain can perform complex neurobiological
reactions just because it’s expecting results, like releasing endorphins or dopamine when
it believes it’s receiving an antidepressant. But that doesn’t mean they know why it does
that. Researchers at Harvard have been studying the negative and positive effects of the placebo
effect, and they consider it a holistic experience. Professor Ted Kaptchuk describes it like this:
"When you look at these studies that compare drugs with placebos, there is the entire environmental
and ritual factor at work. You have to go to a clinic at certain times and be examined
by medical professionals in white coats. You receive all kinds of exotic pills and undergo
strange procedures. All this can have a profound impact on how the body perceives symptoms
because you feel you are getting attention and care."
But this still doesn’t explain why the placebo effect doesn’t always work, or why it’s
more effective in certain people or situations. For now, it’s just one of the brain’s
many unique and confusing traits.
At this point, it feels like we as a species have a pretty decent understanding of the
weather. What causes it, how to predict it, when to talk about it on a failing first date.
One weather phenomenon that has escaped our understanding, however, are morning glory
clouds. This mesmerizing meteorological occurrence looks like something out of a fantasy novel.
While there have been reports of these wild-looking roll clouds around the world, reliable morning
glory clouds are almost solely spotted near Burketown, Australia. Under very specific
circumstances, they can take form and stretch up to 600 miles in length. Tourists reportedly
flock to Burketown each October to try and spot them, including a fair number of hang
gliders who attempt to fly through the unique clouds.
Scientists still don’t really understand morning glory clouds. They have come to a
basic understanding of the specific humidity levels, sea breeze patterns, and mesoscale
circulations that generally precede morning glory clouds, but why they’re so distinct
and nearly unique to this one Australian peninsula is still not understood, very possibly because
no one is willing to adequately fund research into what is a visually arresting but not
necessarily scientifically important cloud. I expect they have something to do with the
smoke monster from Lost but I'm not a meteorologist.
On July 2nd, 1951, Mary Reeser’s landlord stopped by her apartment, where she came upon
a horrifying scene: Reeser’s charred remains. All that was left intact was part of one foot,
still encased in its slipper. Curiously, the room itself was almost completely unburnt.
The FBI investigated and concluded that Mary had taken sleeping pills the previous evening,
reporting that she, quote, “could have become drowsy or fallen asleep while smoking a cigarette,
thus igniting her clothes.” According to their report, her own body fat fed the flames.
For many skeptics, it didn’t seem realistic that a fire so hot could have caused such
minimal damage to Reeser’s apartment. Cremation often requires temperatures well above 2000
degrees. For some, spontaneous human combustion seemed a more plausible explanation. These
doubts even led to one professor from the University of Pennsylvania theorizing that
someone had murdered Mary, incinerated her remains in a crematorium, and then brought
them back to her apartment for someone to find. To this day, no one can explain what
really happened to her.
In the world of unexplainable phenomena, there’s a whole category of mysterious sounds. Some
come from outer space, some from remote parts of the wilderness, and some especially eerie
ones from the depths of the ocean. One such sound is the “upsweep” sound.
Upsweep has been around since at least 1991, when the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory
began recording SOSUS, which had been an underwater soviet surveillance system with multiple listening
stations around the world. The sound “consists of a long train of narrow-band upsweeping
sounds of several seconds duration each,” the lab reports. If that doesn’t give you
the proper idea of how it might sound, take a listen for yourself.
The source of the sound is about halfway between Australia and South America. Curiously, the
upsweep sound changes with the seasons. It’s loudest in spring and Autumn, but scientists
don’t know why. The leading theory behind this mysterious sound? Volcanic activity.
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