Circling the earth aboard Friendship 7 in 1962, John Glenn had an odd encounter:

The strangest sight of all came with the very first ray of sunrise as I was crossing the Pacific toward the U.S. I was checking the instrument panel and when I looked back out the window I thought for a minute that I must have tumbled upside-down and was looking up at a new field of stars. I checked my instruments to make sure I was right-side-up. Then I looked again. There, spread as far as I could see, were literally thousands of tiny luminous objects that glowed in the black sky like fireflies. I was riding slowly through them, and the sensation was like walking backwards through a pasture where someone had waved a wand and made all the fireflies stop right where they were and glow steadily. They were greenish yellow in color, and they appeared to be about six to 10 feet apart. I seemed to be passing through them at a speed of from three to five miles an hour. They were all around me, and those nearest the capsule would occasionally move across the window as if I had slightly interrupted their flow. On the next pass I turned the capsule around so that I was looking right into the flow, and though I could see far fewer of them in the light of the rising sun, they were still there. Watching them come toward me, I felt certain they were not caused by anything emanating from the capsule. I thought perhaps I’d stumbled into the lost batch of needles the Air Force had tried to set up in orbit for communications purposes. But I could think of no reason why needles should glow like fireflies, nor did they look like needles. As far as I know, the true identity of these particles is still a mystery.

They seem to have been ice crystals, flakes of frost shed by the capsule and illuminated by the sun. Scott Carpenter saw a similar display on the next Mercury mission, Aurora 7, a few months later.

(John Glenn, “If You’re Shook Up, You Shouldn’t Be There,” Life, March 9, 1962.)

The border between the United States and Canada blurs a bit between Blaine, Wash., and Surrey, B.C. There stands the Peace Arch, a 20-meter monument to amity between the two nations commissioned by railroad executive Sam Hill in 1921.

The arch stands precisely on the border, at the center of an international park: Citizens of either nation can pass without passport or visa into the other nation’s territory, provided they don’t stray beyond a dedicated area.

The U.S. side of the arch bears the inscription “Children of a common mother,” and the Canadian side reads “Brethren dwelling together in unity.” An iron gate stands open on either side, and an inscription above reads “May these gates never be closed.”

For 88 years the Memorial Bridge carried traffic across the Piscataqua River between Portsmouth, N.H., and Kittery, Maine.

At its opening in 1923, 5-year-old Eileen Foley cut the ribbon.

In 2011, Foley, now 93, tied a ribbon at the closing ceremony.

In the interval she had served several terms as mayor of Portsmouth. “Thank you very much for this afternoon,” she said. “I will never forget it.”

(Thanks, Zach.)

In 1892 Frederic Martyn was fighting in West Africa with the French Foreign Legion when he met with an incident “so remarkable that I hesitate to mention it, as it is pretty certain to be regarded as a mere traveller’s tale”:

A Dahomeyan warrior was killed while in the act of levelling his gun, from behind a cotton tree, at Captain Battreau of the Legion, at point-blank range, and as he fell his rifle clattered down at the officer’s feet. Captain Battreau, seeing that it was an old Chassepot, picked it up out of curiosity, and suddenly became very much interested in it. He examined it very carefully, and then exclaimed, with a gasp of astonishment, ‘Well, this is something like a miracle! Here is the very rifle I used in 1870 during the war with Germany! See that hole in the butt? That was made by a Prussian bullet at Saint-Privat. I could tell that gun from among a million by that mark alone; but here’s my number stamped on it as well, which is evidence enough for anybody. Who would have thought it possible that I could pick up in Africa, as a captain, a rifle that I used in France, as a sergeant, twenty-two years ago? It is incredible!’

Martyn writes, “The sceptical reader will probably think that the captain was ‘pulling our legs’ a bit; but this explanation is inconsistent with the fact that the officer asked for and obtained special permission to keep the rifle as personal property on account of its associations, and he was hardly likely to have done this unless he could prove that it was, in fact, the identical rifle he had formerly used.”

(From Martyn’s 1911 memoir Life in the Legion. Thanks, Kevin.)

On June 30, 1960, a thunderstorm struck the Columbia, Missouri, area and made time not only stand still, but go backward. The Columbia Missourian reported that Mr. C.W. Brenton looked at his electrical clock at 7:55 P.M. and was startled to see that the clock was running backward. During the storm a surge of lightning had entered his home along the power lines and fused some of the wiring in the clock. This apparently reversed the magnetic field of the motor, causing the hands to turn in the wrong direction.

— Peter Viemeister, The Lightning Book, 1961

On Oct. 21, 1966, an avalanche of mining debris descended into the Welsh mining village of Aberfan, filling the classrooms of a local junior school with mud and killing 144 people, 116 of them children. In response to a subsequent newspaper appeal, Shrewsbury psychiatrist J.C. Barker received 76 letters from people who claimed to have had precognition of the event. Of these, 22 were supported by witnesses. This account, by the parents of 10-year-old Eryl Mai Jones, was compiled by a local minister and signed by them as correct:

She was an attractive dependable child, not given to imagination. A fortnight before the disaster she said to her mother, who at the time was putting some money aside for her, ‘Mummy, I’m not afraid to die.’ Her mother replied, ‘Why do you talk of dying, and you so young; do you want a lollipop?’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘But I shall be with Peter and June’ (schoolmates). The day before the disaster she said to her mother, ‘Mummy, let me tell you about my dream last night.’ Her mother answered gently, ‘Darling, I’ve no time now. Tell me again later.’ The child replied, ‘No, Mummy, you must listen. I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it.’ Her mother answered, ‘You mustn’t have chips for supper for a bit.’ The next day off to school went her daughter as happy as ever. In the communal grave she was buried with Peter on one side and June on the other.

“This last point may not, however, be significant, since the order of burial was apparently influenced by parents’ requests.”

(From the Oxford Book of the Supernatural.)

William … asks me to set down the story of Barbara Wilkinson’s Turtle Dove. Barbara is an old maid. She had 2 turtle Doves. One of them died the first year I think. The other bird continued to live alone in its cage for 9 years, but for one whole year it had a companion and daily visitor, a little mouse that used to come and feed with it, and the Dove would caress it, and cower over it with its wings, and make a loving noise to it. The mouse though it did not testify equal delight in the Dove’s company yet it was at perfect ease. The poor mouse disappeared and the Dove was left solitary till its death. It died of a short sickness and was buried under a tree with funeral ceremony by Barbara and her maiden, and one or two others.

— Dorothy Wordsworth, Grasmere Journals, Jan. 30, 1802

In March 1928, the British steamer City of Eastbourne picked up an SOS from the tanker British Hussar in the Pacific but could not locate her position. Japanese authorities reported that several of their own ships and stations had picked up the SOS but could not understand the geographical information given. In comparing the reports, they estimated that the British Hussar was about 400 miles southwest of Hawaii when she ran into trouble. Two Navy destroyers searched the area for five days but found no trace of her.

When they cabled the bad news to the tanker’s owners, they received a puzzling reply. The British Hussar was safely moored off a landing stage at Adaban in the Persian Gulf. She had been nowhere near the Pacific when the messages were sent. But the SOS signals were undeniable.

The British consul at Yokohama found that four ships had been near Hawaii when the signal was received: the City of Eastbourne, the Niagara, the Ventura, and the Asiatic Prince — and, strangely, the Asiatic Prince was also missing.

Now there were two mysteries: An SOS had been received in the Pacific, seemingly sent from a perfectly sound ship 6,000 miles away; and a second ship, equipped with the latest wireless equipment and lifeboats, had vanished in the same region — which had reportedly been lashed by hurricane-force winds at the time.

The explanation that emerged is that the British Hussar’s SOS must have been sent by the Asiatic Prince as it foundered in the storm. The SOS had contained the call sign of the British Hussar, GJVR. The call sign of the Asiatic Prince was GJVP. In Morse code, P is ·- -· and R is ·-· Apparently the central dash had been sent twice.

If this is so, the Asiatic Prince must have gone down with astonishing swiftness — the 10,000-ton steamer had a new hull, new engines, and new equipment, yet sank so quickly that she could manage only one brief message.

In 1848, railroad construction foreman Phineas Gage was blasting rock near Cavendish, Vt., when an explosion sent a 13-pound tamping iron through his cheek and out the top of his head. Remarkably, he survived: Doctor Edward H. Williams found him sitting in a chair outside his lodgings 30 minutes later, saying, “Doctor, here is business enough for you.” It appears that the rod had destroyed much of his left frontal lobe but left the rest of his brain intact — he lived for another 12 years and has survived ever after in psychology textbooks.

In 1978, Russian physicist Anatoli Bugorski suffered a high-tech version of the same accident — he was checking a piece of equipment when the safety mechanisms failed and he put his head in the path of a proton beam, which burned through his face and brain, passing out the back of his head. Doctors expected him to die, but he recovered and even completed his doctorate. The left half of his face was paralyzed and he lost hearing in his left ear, but he’s still alive today.

(Thanks, Pål.)