No Return

The Milanese airship Italia reached the North Pole in 1928, but on the way back to base it encountered worsening weather and crashed to the ice. Ten men were thrown from the cabin; the chief engineer managed to throw them some supplies before he and five others were drawn helplessly away with the drifting envelope.

Nine of the castaways eventually reached civilization, but no trace of the airship or its captives has ever been found.

See also Hope Springs Eternal.

| Oddities · Technology

Earthquake Lights

Witnesses reported seeing “immense columns of flame” shortly before the earthquake that destroyed the Greek cities of Helike and Boura in 373 B.C. Numerous accounts since then have told of aurora-like lights accompanying earthquakes.

They were thought to be a myth until photographs were taken during a Japanese quake in the 1960s, and several corroborating videos have appeared since then. But why they occur is still a mystery.

| Oddities

Rimshot

“I saw a big rat in my cook-stove and when I went for my revolver he ran out.”

“Did you shoot him?”

“No. He was out of my range.”

— The Pun Book, 1906

| Humor

“Singular Accident”

On the 25th of February 1823, a span of horses with a sleigh and lumber box, broke away from the five mile house on the old Schenectady road, and were not heard of until the 17th of March inst. when they were found in a swamp, about a mile and a half from the four mile house. One of the horses, having been thrown down, had, in this situation, eat off half the neck yoke, and the end of the tongue of the sleigh. He was found dead. The other was alive, having remained twenty days, during the most inclement part of the season, without food or water, except what he obtained from browsing in the short space of a hundred feet. Both horses were still in the harness when found, and the articles in the sleigh were found as they had been left.

— “American paper,” cited in The Cabinet of Curiosities, 1824

| Oddities