In a land of giant peaks at the summit of the world, Mount Kailash doesn’t even figure in a list of the 25 highest… in yet it still manages to stand out from all the other mountains in the Tibetan massif. At approximately 22,000 ft above sea level, it is the most sacred site on…
High up in the borderlands between Tibet and China lies the Bayan Kara Ula mountain range, where archaeologist Chi Pu Tei and his team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences are said to have discovered strange burial sites in 1938 in what appeared to be man-made caves. The sites were strange for two reasons: firstly,…
Technological advances are constantly changing scientific interpretations of the composition of our planet… traditionally seen as a solid object comprised of a thin crust, thicker mantle, molten iron outer core and solid inner core. But the seismic evidence of this is far from conclusive… unable to definitively disprove notions of early scientists such as Edmond…
The more research I do into the theory of a “hollow” Earth, the more plausible the notion becomes. Not so much because of the literature that exists on the subject, written during the last two centuries, but based on depictions in the ancient texts of most world religions and the architectural anomalies that appear on…
On Thursday last week two anniversaries relating to American polar explorer Richard Byrd occurred. Firstly it was the 64th anniversary of his death in Boston in 1957, aged 68, and secondly it was the 74th anniversary of the day he was debriefed at the Pentagon following his participation in Operation Highjump, when South American newspaper…
If you browsed through a copy of America’s Social Register you’d find it hard to discover a figure more entwined with the establishment than Richard Evelyn Byrd, a naval officer born in Winchester, Virginia, on 25 October 1888. The son of Esther Bolling and Richard Evelyn Byrd Sr, Byrd was a descendant of one of…
It’s now 114 years since a history-changing association began between English archaeologist Howard Carter and his paymaster Lord Carnarvon. Initially Lord Carnarvon hired Carter to supervise the excavation of nobles’ tombs in Deir el-Bahri, near Thebes, but attentions soon turned to the Valley of the Kings when Lord Carnarvon was granted a concession to dig…
A week ago today it was the 59th anniversary of John Glenn becoming the first American to orbit the Earth, circling it three times during a five-hour mission, almost a year after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had become the first man in space and the first to orbit the earth. Glenn, a lieutenant colonel in…
I know my father was a decent rugby player and an accomplished boxer during his national service, but I’m not really sure where his reverence for the world’s greatest distance runners emanated from. Growing up I remember him talking with great enthusiasm about the likes of Paavo Nurmi, Vladimir Kuts and Emil Zatopek… but one…
Just about every poker player on the planet knows that a pair of black aces and eights are “dead man’s hand” and that the reason harks back to when Wild Bill Hickok was shot in the back of the head while holding them in a game of five-card stud in Deadwood, South Dakota. But the…
