Nature Defying ExplanationDocumented
Caught on Camera After 400 Years: The Enduring Riddle of Ball Lightning
In 1963 a glowing sphere drifted down an airliner's aisle, past a physicist. In 2012, spectrographs finally caught one in the wild — by accident. No one can yet say what it is.
Nature Defying ExplanationDocumented
Eternal Flame Falls: The Fire That Should Not Burn
Behind a small waterfall in New York State, a flame has flickered for generations. When geologists finally tested the rock beneath it in 2013, the textbook explanation fell apart.
Nature Defying ExplanationDisputed
Star Jelly: The Sky Slime That Science Keeps Failing to Name
For seven centuries people have found translucent blobs on the grass after shooting stars and blamed the heavens. The lab results are stranger and more mundane at once.
Nature Defying ExplanationSolved
Blood Falls: The Antarctic Glacier That Bleeds, and the Century It Took to Explain
For more than a hundred years a frozen waterfall in Antarctica has poured what looks like blood onto the ice. The answer, when it finally came, was stranger than algae.
Nature Defying ExplanationDocumented
Rain of Fish: The Honduran Town Where Fish Fill the Streets After the Storm
Once or twice a year the streets of Yoro fill with living fish after a downpour. A miracle, a waterspout, or something stranger climbing up from below?