Category
Physical and Geological
Events written into the ground, the ice, and the instrument record.
29 records
Records in this category
| Record | Case | Date | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| AR-0030 | The Tunguska Event Roughly 2,000 square kilometres of Siberian forest flattened by a meteoroid airburst. | 1908 | Later explained |
| AR-0031 | The Carrington Event One of the largest recorded solar storms. Worldwide auroras and telegraph systems disrupted. | 1859 | Later explained |
| AR-0032 | The Sailing Stones of Racetrack Playa Rocks that move across a dry lakebed on their own. Solved in 2014: thin ice rafts and light wind. | Documented from 1948 | Later explained |
| AR-0033 | The Red Rain of Kerala Red-tinted rainfall in southern India, attributed to airborne algal spores. | 2001 | Later explained |
| AR-0034 | Spontaneous Human Combustion Bodies burned with little external ignition. The wick effect is the leading account. | Claimed since the 18th century | Partially explained |
| AR-0083 | The Vela Incident A US satellite recorded the double flash of a nuclear test. No country has ever admitted it. | 22 September 1979 | Unsolved |
| AR-0084 | The Oklo Natural Reactor Uranium in Gabon was depleted. It had been running as a nuclear reactor, by itself, for hundreds of thousands of years. | c. 1.7 billion years ago | Later explained |
| AR-0085 | The Well to Hell Soviet engineers drilled into a cavity and recorded the screams of the damned. The audio is looped sound effects, often attributed to a 1972 horror film. | Broadcast 1989 | Debunked |
| AR-0086 | Blood Falls Antarctic ice bleeding red. It is iron-rich brine from a lake sealed under the glacier for a million years. | Described 1911, explained 2017 | Later explained |
| AR-0087 | The Devil's Kettle Half a river vanished into a hole and nobody could find where it went. In 2016 someone measured the flow. | Explained 2017 | Later explained |
| AR-0088 | The Eltanin Antenna An alien antenna photographed on the deep sea floor. It is a carnivorous sponge, Chondrocladia concrescens. | 29 August 1964 | Debunked |
| AR-0089 | Rains of Fish and Frogs Animals falling from the sky, documented by reliable witnesses for two hundred years. Waterspouts. | Recorded for centuries | Later explained |
| AR-0090 | The Yamal Craters Enormous holes appearing in the Siberian permafrost, with no impact and no explosion residue. | 2014 onward | Later explained |
| AR-0091 | The Moving Coffins of Barbados Coffins that rearranged themselves in a sealed vault. The earliest account postdates the events by decades. | 1812 to 1820 | Debunked |
| AR-0105 | The Lake Nyos Disaster A crater lake in Cameroon released a cloud of carbon dioxide one night in 1986. About 1,700 people died in the valleys below it. | 1986 | Later explained |
| AR-0112 | The Year Without a Summer June snow and summer frosts ruined harvests in Europe and North America in 1816. The cause was a volcano in Indonesia that erupted the year before. | 1816 | Later explained |
| AR-0119 | The Draupner Wave A laser on a North Sea platform measured a 25.6-metre wave in a 12-metre sea. The rogue wave was real, and in 2018 a lab tank reproduced it. | 1 January 1995 | Later explained |
| AR-0126 | Fairy Circles Bare circles by the million dot the grass at the inland edge of the Namib. Whether termites or thirsty grasses make them is still disputed. | 1971 to present | Partially explained |
| AR-0133 | The Stones That Fell at L'Aigle About 3,000 stones fell around a Normandy town in 1803. The inquiry that followed convinced the last sceptics that rocks fall from the sky. | 1803 | Later explained |
| AR-0140 | The New Madrid Earthquakes Three great earthquakes shook the Mississippi valley in 1811 and 1812, far from any plate boundary. Their size is revised; their cause is unknown. | 1811 to 1812 | Partially explained |
| AR-0147 | The Yonaguni Monument Stepped terraces rise from 25 metres of water off Yonaguni, Japan. One geologist calls them a sunken monument; the sandstone breaks that way unaided. | Found 1986 | Debunked |
| AR-0154 | The Bimini Road A road-like line of stone blocks off Bimini was hailed as Atlantis. Cores show shell rock cemented about 2,800 radiocarbon years ago. | 1968 | Debunked |
| AR-0161 | Milky Seas Sailors report nights when the sea glows milky white to the horizon. Satellites confirm it, but only one research ship on record has sampled one. | Reported for centuries | Partially explained |
| AR-0168 | The Haicheng Earthquake Prediction China was hailed in 1975 for predicting the Haicheng earthquake. Declassified records show the warning came from foreshocks and local officials. | 1975 | Partially explained |
| AR-0175 | The Carancas Impact A meteorite made a crater in the Peruvian Andes in 2007 and villagers fell ill. The impact is well recorded. The illness is still unexplained. | 2007 | Partially explained |
| AR-0194 | The Nazca Lines A survey nearly doubled the known figure count. The purpose question narrowed, it did not close. | c. 500 BC to AD 650 | Partially explained |
| AR-0195 | The Patomskiy Crater A Siberian cone that is not an impact crater, and that went on growing into the 1850s. | c. AD 1500 to 1859 | Partially explained |
| AR-0196 | The Tall el-Hammam Airburst Claim A Sodom-airburst paper, two corrections, an editor’s note, and then retraction in 2025. | 2021 to 2025 | Debunked |
| AR-0197 | The Philadelphia Experiment The invisible warship story first surfaces in the 1950s, in one man’s letters, not in 1943. | Alleged 1943, surfaces 1955 to 1956 | Debunked |