Reports of the bizarre rat king phenomenon date back to the 16th century, but the recent discovery of a Russian farmer who found five small rats with their tails tied in a giant knot is once again causing scientists to scratch their heads.

A rat king occurs when the tails of multiple rodents become so entangled that even an adult human, let alone a creature without opposable thumbs and advanced brain, would have trouble detangling. Rat kings have been reported numerous times since the mid-16th century, but scientists have yet to properly understand how and why it occurs, or even if it is a natural phenomenon or just a man-made hoax. The discovery of a new rat king in a flooded field in Russia has once again brought the very existence of the phenomenon into the debate.

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Ram Kand Mool, a drum-shaped tuber that has been sold as a hearty snack on Indian street corners for at least several decades remains a mystery to scientists, as no one can figure out what plant produces it.

Indian botanists developed an interest in ram kand mool in the 1980s, after trying and failing to find out the origins of the almost paper-thin snacks cut out of giant reddish tubers by street vendors. None of them were willing to reveal the plant that produced it, and those that did gave conflicting answers. Some claimed that it was a root, others that it was the stem of a plant, but most either refused to answer or claimed that they bought the tubers from third parties and genuinely didn’t know the source. Stranger still was the fact that not even science could provide a clear answer to the botanists’ questions.

Ram kand mool is often advertised as the only food source of Lord Ram when he was exiled to forests along with his wife Sita and brother Lakshman, and vendors claim it can cool you down during the summer, quench both hunger and thirst, and provide all sorts of medicinal relief. It is served with all sorts of seasonings, from chili and salt, to lime and sugar. It’s cut and served as very thin slices out of tubers that can reportedly weigh up to 300 kilograms.

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Araucaria columnaris, also known as the coral reef araucaria, Cook pine or New Caledonia pine, is a species of conifer native to New Caledonia that tends to tilt sideways when planted outside its natural habitat.

First classified by Johann Reinhold Forster, a botanist accompanying Captain James Cook on his second voyage to circumnavigate the globe as far south as possible, the araucaria columnaris soon became popular all around the world, thanks to its distinctive narrowly conical shape and its height (up to 60 meters). Nowadays, these evergreen giants are planted as ornamental trees in various areas with warm and temperate climate on five continents, and they generally don’t attract too much attention, but in some cases they have one noticeable particularity – they lean heavily to one side, and when there are more of them planted in the same area, they all lean in the same direction…

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One of the last thing you expect to see in the middle of an urban paved street is a grave complete with a large tombstone, but that’s exactly what you’re treated to when driving through the Turkish city of Sivas.

Yeni Mahalle Hamzaoğlu is one of the several streets that traverse the relatively new Şarkışla district of Sivas, in central Turkey, but there’s something special about it. At one point, motorists need to make sure that they don’t drive straight into a grave located right in the middle of the asphalt. It’s been there for several years now, but only recently gained national attention, after photos and drone footage went viral on social media.

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A mysterious ruined villa was recently discovered on a beach in Costa del Sol, El Salvador, leaving tourists scratching their heads at how it got there.

One of the last things you would expect to find washed up on a tropical beach is a concrete villa, and yet that’s exactly the kind of bizarre attraction that beachgoers at the picturesque La Puntilla Beach are treated to these days. It’s unclear how the abandoned home ended up on the popular beach, but it seems to have been there a while, as it is covered up with what appears like recent graffiti. One of the most popular theories is that the villa was the victim of a powerful hurricane that his El Salvador over two decades ago.

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In the arid wastes of eastern Yemen lies a fascinating natural wonder called the Well of Barhout. Shrouded in mystery and folklore, this large hole in the ground said to be the most hated spot on Earth to God.

Located in the eponymous valley, Barhout Well is 30 meters wide and thought to be anywhere between 100 and 250 meters deep. The depth is just pure estimation, as no one has been down to the bottom of it, and considering the chilling legends and stories surrounding it, I doubt any of the locals would attempt a decent. Not even Yemeni scientists and explorers have been able to reach the bottom, as the low oxygen and strange odors emanating from the well forced them back to the surface.

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A cedar forest in Japan’s Miyazaki Prefecture is home to a couple of unusual crop circle-like patterns that are clearly not random in nature.

Photos of the bizarre patterns, which are visible only from above, made their way on the internet about three years ago and fueled all kinds of conspiracy theories that involved everything from aliens to secret government experiments. Well, that second one turned out to be quite close to the truth, only the experiments weren’t secret, and they weren’t conducted by some obscure outfit, but by Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. Back in 1973 an area of land near Nichinan City was designated as “experimental forestry” and the results of that experiment are visible today.

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For at lest 300 years, hikers in California’s Santa Lucia Mountains have been reporting sightings of shadowy, mysterious silhouettes popularly known as “dark watchers”.

The first reports of giant figures ominously perched on mountaintops date back to the 1700s, when the Spanish first came to California. They were actually the first to dub these mysterious strangers “los Vigilantes Oscuros” (the dark watchers), but the first Anglo-American settlers that came after them reported similar sightings, and the figures eventually became part of the local folklore. The strange thing is that dark watchers still show themselves to hikers in the Santa Lucia Mountains, and some have even been captured on camera.

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Thousands of people are living fear of being swallowed up by the Earth after hundreds of sinkholes appear in an area that was shaken by strong earthquake just over two months ago.

On December 29, 2020, Croatia recorded its strongest earthquake ever. Measured at 6.4 points on the Richter magnitude scale, the quake directly affected 116,000 people, mainly in the cities of Petrinja, Sisak, and Glina, and the rural areas around them. Over 35,000 homes and 4,550 businesses were damaged by the strong tremor and its many aftershocks, and five fatalities attributed to the destructive natural phenomenon were reported. Now, over two months since the earthquake, people in the affected area are even more worried about the sink holes that keep appearing.

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A helicopter crew from Utah’s Department of Public Safety recently discovered a large metal monolith in the rocky desert of southeastern Utah. So far, no one knows what the metal object actually is, or how it got there.

Last Wednesday, while helping the Division of Wildlife Resources count bighorn sheep in southeastern Utah, members of a helicopter crew from the Utah Department of Public Safety’s Aero Bureau spotted something unusual in the rocky, barren desert below. A smooth, shiny metallic block rising up from the earths isn’t something you usually stumble into around those parts, so the crew decided to land and take a closer look at it. While it failed to do anything worthy of a sci-fi movie, the mysterious structure did raise a lot of questions, most of which remain unanswered.

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Ever since the 1960s, seismologists on multiple continents have detected a mysterious pulse generated like clockwork, every 26 seconds. But in the last 60 years no one has been able to figure out what this sound actually is.

The “heartbeat of the Earth” was first documented in 1962, by John Oliver, a researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, Columbia University. He figured out that it was coming from somewhere in the southern or equatorial Atlantic Ocean, and that it was more intense during the Northern Hemisphere’s summer months. Then, in 1980, Gary Holcomb, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, also discovered the mysterious pulse, noting that it was stronger during storms. But for some reason, the two researchers’ discoveries remained virtually unknown for over two decades, until a graduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, once again detected the “heartbeat” and decided to look into it.

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Italy is the world’s second largest kiwi producer after China, but for the past eight years farmers have been battling a mysterious enemy that has so far killed over twenty percent of the country’s kiwi plants.

It starts with the leaves. They wither and face downwards, and within 10 days they all fall to the ground, leaving the kiwi fruits exposed to direct sunlight. Underground, the roots of the vine darken and begin to rot. In a year or two, the whole plant withers and dies. There is no known cure, and by the time farmers start noticing the symptoms described above, it is already much too late to do anything about it.  The farmers call it morìa, or “die-off”, and it had devastated plantations where kiwi vines have thrived for decades.

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A 17-year-old teenager from India’s Uttar Pradesh state is allegedly living in fear after being bitten by the same wild snake a whopping eight times in a single month.

Yashraj Mishra, from Rampur village in Basti district, reportedly lives in constant fear after being targeted by a snake for reasons that remain unknown. After learning of his plight, the 17-year-old’s family took him to the village doctor for treatment and also appealed to snake charmers, but nothing seemed to stop the snake. After he was bitten for the third time, the family even shipped the teen to a relative’s home in a neighboring village, but the slithering reptile allegedly tracked him down and bit him again…

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Legend says that they are footprints of the gods, others believe that they are UFO landing sights, and scientists have their own theories, but the truth is that no one really knows how the fairy circles dotting the Namib coastal desert came to be.

Fairy circles are uniformly distributed round gaps in arid grassland across the Namib which look like polka dots on fabric when see from the air. Until 2014, they were known to only occur along the Namib Desert in southern Africa, but then almost identical formations were discovered near the mining town of Newman in Western Australia. Still, the fairy circles of Namibia remain the most famous and fascinating to the scientists who have studied them since the 1970’s. Theories about their formation and purpose abounds, but so far no one has been able to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that theirs is the true answer to this decades-old enigma.

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MDZhB is the name of a mysterious radio station that has been broadcasting for nearly four decades, but that no one has ever claimed to operate.

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week since 1982, MDZhB (pronounced ‘MJB’) has been broadcasting a dull, monotonous tone followed by a second, foghorn-like sound every few seconds. But every once in a while, about once or twice a week, someone will also utter some random phrase in Russian, like “dinghy” or “farming specialist”, and the the droning sound returns. The mystery of MDZhB has fascinated radio enthusiasts around the world for centuries, and theories regarding its purpose range from nuclear war triggering device, to communicating with aliens. But, so far, no one has been able to crack the mystery of this radio station.

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