At first glance, the Petralona skull looks like something Tolkien rejected for being too implausible. A human cranium, missing its jaw, with what appears to be a pointed horn erupting from its forehead. Half man, half unicorn, all nightmare fuel. The story begins in 1960, when a shepherd stumbled into a cave in northern Greece and found a skull fused to the wall. Over millennia, mineral deposits had glued the cranium in place and grown into a stalagmite that jutted out like a bony spear. It looked less like a fossil and more like the remains of some unfortunate creature

On May 19, 2025, a British Airways A320 lifted out of Heathrow on a routine climb. The sky was clear, the jet was steady, and central London slid quietly below. Then something decidedly non-routine appeared. The pilots reported a bright triangular object, not off in the distance but close enough that it filled part of their windscreen. Air traffic control confirmed they saw something too, and radar picked up a mystery blip just 300 metres in front of the aircraft. That is the sort of separation you expect from a disciplined queue at Greggs, not a commercial jet travelling at

In the late 1970s, the U.S. Army quietly funded one of its strangest projects. Codenamed Gondola Wish, the unit was tasked with training “remote viewers”—people who claimed they could leave their bodies, travel with their minds, and spy on Soviet targets without ever leaving a chair. The man behind it was F. Holmes “Skip” Atwater, a military intelligence officer with a taste for the unconventional. Over time, Gondola Wish evolved through a carousel of codenames—Grill Flame, Center Lane, Sun Streak—and eventually merged into what became known as the Stargate Project. Millions of dollars went into exploring whether psychic phenomena could

Imagine sitting in a locked room with nothing but a pencil and being asked to describe a place you’ve never been, maybe on the other side of the planet. You close your eyes, let your mind wander, and then you start sketching. Hours later, your drawing looks suspiciously like a Soviet airbase you couldn’t possibly know existed. That was remote viewing, and for more than two decades the CIA quietly paid people to do exactly that. The programme was called Stargate. Officially, it was about testing psychic potential. Unofficially, it was about keeping pace with the Soviets, who were rumoured

If I told you the U.S. government once patented a way to use the wiring in your walls to influence your mental state, you’d probably file me under “conspiracy theorist in need of tinfoil.” But here’s the problem: it’s true. In 2006, an application was filed that would become US Patent 8579793 B1. By 2013, it was granted. The design? A system that pushes low-frequency electromagnetic signals into ordinary building wiring. Those signals aren’t just electrical noise, they’re engineered to interact with human brainwaves. The official purpose was neural entrainment. That’s the polite term for nudging brain rhythms into states

If you ever need a reminder that humans are not quite as clever as we like to think, consider slime mould. It is not a plant, not an animal, not even a fungus. It is a shapeless yellow blob, technically a single cell, that manages to behave like a distributed intelligence system without the faintest trace of a brain. Somewhere between spilled custard and sentient porridge, slime mould quietly undermines the idea that neurons are the only path to cleverness. One of the most famous experiments involved giving the mould a map of Tokyo. Researchers placed oat flakes where major