At eleven on a Sunday morning in 1978, something detonated over a small iron-mining island in Newfoundland. Fuse boxes threw blue flame across rooms, televisions burst, a shed came off its foundation with the chickens inside, and two neat holes were punched into a field. American satellites built to catch nuclear tests registered the flash, and Los Alamos sent scientists. Nearly fifty years later the file is still open.

On a Victorian bridge outside Dumbarton, dogs have been going over the same few metres of parapet for seventy years, almost always on clear days, almost always long-nosed breeds. In 2005 two specialists went looking at the bridge through a dog's eyes and came back with an answer involving a smell no human can detect. The answer still has holes in it.

For more than a hundred years, travellers crossing outback Queensland have described a light that rises out of the dark, hovers above the horizon, and follows them for kilometres. In 1992 a neuroscientist built one to order, using nothing but a car and ten kilometres of empty road. Boulia was not entirely grateful.

For years it burned across northern skies in plain sight, a slender river of mauve no textbook could explain. Then a handful of aurora chasers gave it a name, and professional science was forced to admit it had overlooked something enormous overhead.

For four centuries sailors have described whole oceans turning to cold white fire, glowing to the horizon under a dark sky. Satellites have finally caught the phenomenon in the act, yet what tips a patch of ordinary sea into a hundred thousand square kilometers of silent light remains one of the last mysteries hiding in plain sight.

For two months in 2001, rain the colour of blood fell over southern Kerala. An alga explains the colour completely. What it doesn't explain is how fifty thousand kilograms of spores climbed into the sky and came down, again and again, red.

On a cloudless March morning in 1876, chunks of what looked like fresh meat rained onto a Kentucky farm. Two men tasted it. The laboratory answer was stranger than anyone expected.

Marco Polo blamed desert spirits; Darwin heard a hill the locals called 'the roarer.' At around 35 sites the sand really does boom one deep note - yet the physicists who can trigger it on command in a lab still cannot agree on why it sings.

A storm so reliable that sailors navigated by it, a nation put it on a flag — and legend says it won a naval battle. Lightning 28 times a minute, up to 160 nights a year. Then, in 2010, it vanished. Science can forecast it better than it can explain it.

Thirteen days before a magnitude-5.9 earthquake struck Quebec in 1988, witnesses watched a pink-purple globe of light drift along the St. Lawrence River. Science has catalogued 65 such cases since 1600, and still cannot agree on what they are.

In 1908, a blast many times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb flattened some 80 million trees across a swath of Siberia larger than a major city. It left no crater, no confirmed fragment, and a question science still cannot fully close: what came out of the sky that morning?

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.