An article in the magazine The Horse entitled Carnivorous Horses by Dr Sue McDonnell in which she described horses killing and devouring other animals, spurred some letters to the editors from...
Nuclear power has caused some serious disasters throughout the world. Is it a modern phenomenon, or is there evidence of its existence in the ancient world? The worst nuclear disaster in the United...
The canoti (or canotila) are small creatures found in Sioux culture , canoti meaning “tree-dweller” and canotila signifying “small tree-dweller.” Considered tiny messengers of beings who exist in the...
Immuring themselves in an underground stone chamber, sealed tight, waiting to die: that is what more than 24 known individuals did in northern Japan from the 1200s until the 19th century, though it...
In 2016, Ancient Origins published an article entitled Is Marco Polo a Fictional Characte r? and it led to hate-mail and overall outrage among some readers. It was blown so out-of-proportion that the...
In the Valley of Hinnom near Jerusalem stood a giant statue of the god Moloch. The valley and the deity are infamous for their historical association with child sacrifice. According to some...
As a researcher of unusual historical phenomena, I investigate strange stories, but I had no intention of doing so in Alberta, Canada. Nevertheless, I came across something that was truly odd in the...
It would be difficult to find someone who did not know anything about the Nazis, whose reign ended with the outright slaughter of approximately six million Jews, whom they regarded as subhuman, and...
Pope Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) exploded in 1956. To understand why this occurred, it is necessary to explore the (Catholic and Orthodox) Christian practice of mummification, which is rarely...
The King of the Beasts triumphs in Chinese mythology, albeit in many shapes and forms. Chinese artists combined different creatures’ attributes to create a composite beast, which they called pixiu (...
Considering that fanciful animals, which the Chinese collectively dub pixiu ( pi hsieh ), typically stem from a real creature, the question must be asked: Were there once horses with horns? Although...
A strange animal that preys upon unsuspecting travelers, who devours them but cannot swallow them, may be representative of the human sin of gluttony, as the taotie, a Chinese mythological fantastic...
A legend is a tale regarded as historical even though it has not been proven, and the term “myth” can refer to common yet false ideas. Many myths and legends describe our history, but they are often...
Peru has a rich and mysterious history. With extant indigenous groups such as the Uros, Quechua, Aymara, and the Jivaro, which are known for their head-shrinking techniques, and historical...
An unusual pentagonal diagram with numbers and letters is found in some old texts. The oldest extant version is in a French book published in 1754, but the image and explanation that accompanies it...
Based upon historical analyses, it is unlikely that a person named Marco Polo who visited China in the 1200’s existed. Before presenting this argument, here is an analogy: if people do not know that...