Aug. 1, 1932, was a strange day for Londoner G.A. Hinkson:

Suddenly torrential rain fell only one hundred yards from where I was standing. The nearest trees in Kensington Gardens were almost hidden behind a milky mist of heavy rain. The rain-drops rebounding off the street created a layer of spray as high as the tops of the wheels of the taxis standing in the street. Where I was sheltering, hardly a drop of rain was falling. … Then the spray on the ground came nearer like a wave and receded. Suddenly it vanished completely.

From Meteorological Magazine, 64:159-60, 1932.

Ordered to join a jungle snake cult in his native Togo, Tété-Michel Kpomassie chanced to find a book about Greenland in a local Jesuit library. At the first opportunity he ran away.

Kpomassie’s 1981 autobiography, An African in Greenland, tells of his odyssey through West Africa and Europe seeking a route to the frozen island. He finally arrived in the mid-1960s, a black giant among the Inuit:

As soon as they saw me, all stopped talking. So intense was the silence, you could have heard a gnat in flight. Then they started to smile again, the women with slightly lowered eyes. When I was standing before them on the wharf, they all raised their heads to look me full in the face. Some children clung to their mothers’ coats, and others began to scream with fright or to weep.

Kpomassie happily spent the next two years driving a dogsled and hunting seal in a kayak. After eight years, he had reached the land of his dreams — a country with no trees and no snakes.

In 1954, a Chilean lawyer named Jenaro Gajardo Vera tried to join a local club but was rejected because he owned no real property. He was pondering how to overcome this problem when he looked into the night sky and found his solution.

He claimed the moon.

The local notary acknowleded that Gajardo’s claim met the technical requirements for real property, and no prior owner objected when he published a notice in Chile’s Diario Oficial. Gajardo was granted a deed, returned to the club, and received his membership.

This story is popular in Chile, but most of the sources are in Spanish, so I’m finding it hard to tell where the truth ends and the romance begins. It does appear that a lawyer named Jenaro Gajardo Vera was born in Chile and lived in Talca, as the story says. But you’ll have to decide how much of the rest to believe. It’s commonly said that:

• In 1969, Gajardo received a dispatch from Richard Nixon asking permission for American astronauts to land on his property.
• Gajardo failed to list the moon on his real property tax return, which led to trouble with the Chilean revenue office. When agents confronted him, he asked them to survey the property themselves, as the law required, and they dropped the action.
• Minister of the Supreme Court Galecio Ruben Gomez once asked why, if Gajardo could register the moon, he could not register Mars using the same argument. Gajardo pointed out that Mars does not belong to the earth, and thus is not open to a civil law property claim.
• In 2000, two years after Gajardo’s death, two strangers approached his family saying that NASA wanted to establish bases on the moon, which could bring them substantial revenue. The family paid them a large fee to “regularize Gajardo’s legacy,” and the strangers disappeared.

I’d be grateful to hear from anyone who can substantiate or debunk any of this. I’ll post any updates here. It’s certainly a wonderful story. (Thanks, Benito.)

03/17/2010 Update: Doubtful but intriguingly murky. It appears that Gajardo did publish a deed to the moon three times in Chile’s official record in 1953, but that in itself doesn’t carry much weight. Today the matter would be governed by the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, but (a) that appeared 14 years after Gajardo’s claim, and we don’t know whether it’s retroactive, (b) we don’t know whether Chile is a signatory, and (c) ironically, the very fact that the treaty denies nations jurisdiction over celestial objects may mean that no court would have jurisdiction to hear the case. Gajardo’s is one of at least four such claims made between 1950 and 1970 alone, including one by the “Elves, Gnomes and Little Men’s Science Fiction, Chowder and Marching Society” of Berkeley, Calif., who claimed part of the Sea of Tranquility in 1952. It will certainly be an interesting war.

Particular thanks to Kirk and John for help in researching this.

A curious phenomenon occurred at the farm of Balvullich, on the estate of Ord, occupied by Mr Moffat, on the evening of Monday last. Immediately after one of the loudest peals of thunder heard there, a large and irregular-shaped mass of ice, reckoned to be nearly 20 feet in circumference, and of a proportionate thickness, fell near the farm-house. It had a beautiful crystalline appearance, being nearly all quite transparent, if we except a small portion of it which consisted of hailstones of uncommon size, fixed together. It was principally composed of small squares, diamond-shaped, of from 1 to 3 inches in size, all firmly congealed together. The weight of this large piece of ice could not be ascertained; but it is a most fortunate circumstance, that it did not fall on Mr Moffat’s house, or it would have crushed it, and undoubtedly have caused the death of some of the inmates. No appearance whatever of either hail or snow was discernible in the surrounding district.

– Scotsman, Aug. 11, 1849, quoted in The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, October 1849

It has been discovered that on the extreme left of the façade front of the new [Boston] Public Library building are chiseled in tablets the following names: Moses, Cicero, Kalidasa, Isocrates, Milton, Mozart, Euclid, Æschylus, Dante, Wren, Herrick, Irving, Titian, Erasmus. These names form an acrostic, the first letters spelling the names of the firm of architects which has furnished the plan for the building. A representative of the architects [McKim, Mead and White] says he can assign no reason for it except that it was ‘a prank of some of the boys in the office.’ Three of these names, Dante, Milton and Titian, appear on the other tablets and in their proper places. This duplication is another proof that the acrostic was intentional.

– The Critic, June 4, 1892

(After a public outcry, the inscription was removed.)

Passing south of the Canary Islands on Dec. 4, 1893, the S.S. Umfuli passed “a monster fish of the serpentine shape, about 80 feet long, with shining skin, and short fins, about 20 feet apart, on the back; in circumference, about the dimensions of a full-sized whale.”

Neither captain R.J. Cringle nor his crew had ever seen anything like it, but they were certain of what they saw. The sea was like a mirror, “and this thing, whatever it was, was in sight for over half an hour.”

Cringle said it was rushing through the water at great speed, throwing water from its breast, and he saw fully 15 feet of its head and neck on three separate occasions. The body, which was not scaly, showed three distinct humps and was much thicker than the neck: “I should not, therefore, call it a serpent.” The Umfuli’s log shows that the chief officer observed the creature through his glass and saw an enormous mouth with great rows of teeth.

“I have been so ridiculed about the thing that I have many times wished that anybody else had seen that sea-monster rather than me,” Cringle said. “I have been told that it was a string of porpoises, that it was an island of seaweed, and I do not know what besides. But if an island of seaweed can travel at the rate of fourteen knots an hour, or if a string of porpoises can stand 15 feet out of the water, then I give in, and confess myself deceived. Such, however, could not be.”

On March 19, 1886, over Oshkosh, Wis., the sun went out.

“The day was light, though cloudy, when suddenly darkness commenced settling down, and in five minutes it was as dark as midnight,” reported the Monthly Weather Review. “General consternation prevailed; people on the streets rushed to and fro; teams dashed along, and women and children ran in cellars; all business operations ceased until lights could be lighted. Not a breath of air was stirring on the surface of the earth. The darkness lasted from eight to ten minutes, when it passed off, seemingly from west to east, and brightness followed. … It seemed to be a wave of total darkness passing along without wind.”

No one knows the cause, but essentially the same thing had happened a century earlier.

Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti (1774-1849) was keeper of the Vatican library and later a cardinal, but he’s best remembered for being a hyperpolyglot, a speaker of many languages.

How many? Estimates range from 24 (in 1805) to 114 (judged after his death). The true number probably lies somewhere in between, but it’s considerable–Byron called Mezzofanti “a monster of languages, the Briareus of parts of speech.”

A Russian traveler once asked Mezzofanti for a list of the dialects he had mastered, and the cardinal sent him the name of God in 56 languages. And Gregory XVI once arranged to have a polyglot group of students waylay him in the Vatican gardens: “[O]n a sudden, at a given signal, these youths grouped themselves for a moment on their knees before his Holiness, and then, quickly rising, addressed themselves to Mezzofanti, each in his own tongue, with such an abundance of words and such a volubility of tone, that, in the jargon of dialects, it was almost impossible to hear, much less to understand, them. But Mezzofanti did not shrink from the conflict. With the promptness and address which were peculiar to him, he took them up singly, and replied to each in his own language, with such spirit and elegance as to amaze them all.”

For another prodigious librarian, see Book Lover.