From France’s Sanch Procession to the Yoruba’s Egungun, practically every culture of the world has a type of masquerade ceremony where people were intricate masks for religious purposes. Some argue that Halloween is a type of masquerade.

Phyllis Galembo is a photographer based out of SUNY who has spent 20 years photographing masquerade ceremonies in Brazil, Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, and Nigeria. One of the most complete sets of her work that I’ve been able to find is her West African Masquerade series.

Enjoy them here.

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Two centuries ago, Robert Patterson (no, not the Twilight star) sent a letter to Thomas Jefferson. Both men were members of the American Philosophical Society and frequently wrote to each other. In this particular letter, Patterson discussed the 4 requirements for a “perfect” cipher:

1. It should work in any language.
2. It should be easy to memorize.
3. It should be simple to perform.
4. It should be indecipherable to anyone who doesn’t have the key.

The last requirement was especially important to Patterson and to demonstrate he included a cipher which he said would “defy the united ingenuity of the whole human race to decypher to the end of time”.

Harvard Magazine explains exactly how complicated the cipher was:

In his more sophisticated code, Patterson wrote his message openly, without capitals or spaces, but vertically on ruled paper, “in the Chinese manner,” in columns from left to right. This produces a grid of lowercase letters that are gibberish when read left to right, but a perfectly clear message when read in columns. Next he broke this grid into sections of up to nine lines each, numbering each line 1, 2, 3, etc., and re-ordering them randomly within the section—though all sections would repeat the same reordered sequence of numbers. He also inserted up to nine arbitrary letters at the beginning of each line, which had no bearing on the message content but drastically increased the inscrutability factor. He filled vacant spaces at the end of the line with similarly random letters.

The cipher became something that Jefferson historians would occasionally reference but proved too difficult to break. That is, until Lawren Smithline, a 36-year-old mathematician and professional cryptologist, decided to take a crack at it. He used techniques that were available in the 19th century but used computers to perform the computations.

The Wall Street Journal explains how Smithline cracked the ciper:

Undaunted, Dr. Smithline decided to tackle the cipher by analyzing the probability of digraphs, or pairs of letters. Certain pairs of letters, such as “dx,” don’t exist in English, while some letters almost always appear next to a certain other letter, such as “u” after “q”.

To get a sense of language patterns of the era, Dr. Smithline studied the 80,000 letter-characters contained in Jefferson’s State of the Union addresses, and counted the frequency of occurrences of “aa,” “ab,” “ac,” through “zz.”

Dr. Smithline then made a series of educated guesses, such as the number of rows per section, which two rows belong next to each other, and the number of random letters inserted into a line.

To help vet his guesses, he turned to a tool not available during the 19th century: a computer algorithm. He used what’s called “dynamic programming,” which solves large problems by breaking puzzles down into smaller pieces and linking together the solutions.

The overall calculations necessary to solve the puzzle were fewer than 100,000, which Dr. Smithline says would be “tedious in the 19th century, but doable.”

After about a week of working on the puzzle, the numerical key to Mr. Patterson’s cipher emerged — 13, 34, 57, 65, 22, 78, 49.

The cracked text?

“In Congress, July Fourth, one thousand seven hundred and seventy six. A declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled. When in the course of human events…”

A clever joke by Patterson.

Links: 1, 2, 3.

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Everyone enjoys a good hoax regardless of their personal beliefs about the paranormal. The following are examples of famous hoaxes that captivated the personal interest and imagination in their time, only to let everyone down once the truth emerged. Some still believe that these are true.

1. Amityville

Ronald DeFeo, Jr. shocked the sleepy New York town of Amityville in 1974 by brutally murdering his entire family in their sleep. But the next residents, the Lutz family, made the town infamous by fleeing ten days, 28-days, or a month later (depending on who you ask), claiming that evil spirits had driven them out. A bestselling book, string of movies, and interviews followed, turning Amityville into an international sensation. However, it turned out that the Lutz family made up the entire story to get out of an expensive mortgage. Practically all of their claims, including the notion that the iconic house was built on an Indian burial ground, have been easily debunked and later residents have adamantly stated they’ve never experienced anything supernatural. But that doesn’t stop people from clinging to the idea of a haunted house in Amityville.

2. Cottingley Fairies

To the modern eye, it is difficult to believe that this series of five photos, taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, could be taken seriously by anyone. The fairies look like cut out pictures, very likely drawn by Elsie herself, and sport popular hair styles of the time and trendy clothes. However, the pictures stirred up a lot of drama in 1916, and even attracted the support and attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle, a Spiritualist, used his celebrity to spread the story as truth and used a series of questionable “tests” to prove their accuracy. Both girls insisted that the fairies were real until 1981, when they admitted that all but one of the photos had been faked, and both held onto the almost comical claim that despite the fakes, they really had been playing with fairies.

3. The Bermuda Triangle

Easily the most infamous patch of water, the Bermuda Triangle is made by connecting Miami (or Ft. Lauderdale), Bermuda, and Puerto Rico, and has been known for making airplanes, ships, and small boats vanish. It has long been the subject of movies, books, and serious documentaries but there isn’t a shred of evidence to support the notion that anything disappears there. The majority of disappearances have logical explanations that are far from mysterious. According to Larry Kusche, a writer that focused on the Triangle, most of disappearances were sensationalized by writers. A little digging shows that either a storm was in progress, remains were found, or nothing really happened. But don’t tell this to the History Channel, as it might interrupt their programming schedule.

4. Crop Circles

Even today many believe that crop circles, areas where crops are stamped down into geometric shapes, are created by space aliens. But the truth is that they are easily debunked and have always appeared in areas where bored, drunk people have access to lazily guarded crops since the 17th century. The most famous cases started popping up in England in the ’70s, and people quickly panicked about the ensuing alien invasion. (It didn’t happen.) In 1991, two men came forward and admitted that they started the rash of circles in their area after coming up with the idea at their local pub. (I want a pint of whatever they’re drinking!) Doug Bower and David Chorley might have never revealed their secret had Mrs. Bower not grown suspicious of her husband sneaking away at night.

5. Uri Geller’s Bending Spoons

Geller has built a career on claiming that be can bend spoons, hanging out with Michael Jackson, and dragging naysayers through the court system when they’ve dared to call him a fraud. (We aren’t calling you a fraud, Uri.) Over the years, he has been debunked numerous times, including on particularly hilarious time when he was filmed using a magnet to move a compass, but he has always managed to get any video that pops up pulled from YouTube under threat of legal action. His arch-nemesis, James Randi, replaced his prop spoons on The Tonight Show in 1973, and not a single spoon was bent that night. Randi has gone on to demonstrate how the spoon bending trick is nothing more than a parlour trick that anyone can perform, but that doesn’t stop people from still believing that Geller has magical powers.

6. William Mumler

A jeweler turned photographer, Mumler took advantage of the still new and not entirely understood medium to produce the first known photographs of “spirits”. Working out of his New York studio during the Civil War, he made money off bereaved relatives that were convinced that the images superimposed over their own was that of a deceased relative. He even fooled Mary Todd Lincoln with a spirit photograph allegedly depicting assassinated president Abraham Lincoln standing just beside her, a hand placed lovingly on her shoulder. Eventually, people began to notice that some of the spirits in the photographs resembled his studio assistants. Even though he was acquitted of fraud, his reputation was ruined and he died penniless some time in 1884. This doesn’t stop modern spirit photographers from basically doing the same thing and people believing it is real.

7. The Bigfoot Corpse

Matt Whitton and Rick Dyer were behind one of most outrageous hoaxes in very recent history. In June 2008, they claimed that they had the corpse of Bigfoot stuffed into a freezer after having found it in the Georgia woods. The media exploded and Bigfoot enthusiasts quickly claimed victory over skeptics. Searching for Bigfoot, a California based group, purchased the “corpse” for $50,000, only to discover once it thawed out that they had been sold a rubber suit. Whitton, a police officer, lost his job over the incident, and Searching for Bigfoot is suing both men. Goes to show that you should always see what you are buying before you shell out the money for it.

8. The Fox Sisters

People have a tendency to explain stupid things as paranormal. Kate, Leah, and Margaret Fox of Hydesville, New York, were no exception, as they helped kick off the Spiritualist movement when strange noises that startled their parents and drew huge crowds in the 19th century were explained as spirits. For some reason no one pointed out that the sounds followed the sisters and sounded a lot like cracking knuckles and foot tappings. They were huge on the Spiritualist circuit until 1888, when Margaret admitted it was all a hoax, and that not only did they crack knuckles, but they tied apples to their toes and bumped them on the floor for effect. This admission caused a rift between the sisters, two of whom died in poverty within 5 years. The last sister, Leah, distanced herself from the other two and stated that they were alcoholics unfit to care for their children.

9. Alien Autopsy

Everyone seems to love the idea that aliens have, or currently are, visiting us. In 1995, Ray Santilli, a London video entrepreneur, released a video he claimed depicted a 1947 alien autopsy performed after Roswell. Grainy and filmed at angles that conveniently blocked the actual autopsy in some places, this was a hotly disputed piece of film that had skeptics rolling their eyes and Ufologists eager to study it further. Fox fanned the flames even more by releasing Alien Autopsy – Fact or Fiction, a program that showed the autopsy and discussed its authenticity. In 2006, Santilli admitted that large portions of the film were made with dummy aliens, animal innards, and jelly. He still claims that parts of it are authentic, but refuses to reveal which parts are the “real footage”. In 2008, another alien autopsy video became popular in YouTube, continuing the cycle.

10. The Angels of Mons

The Angels of Mons was not a deliberate hoax, rather it is an urban legend that sprang up from a fictional story written by Arthur Machen during World War I. The bloody Battle of Mons was a wake up call for the British, showing that the war would not be “won by Christmas”. Inspired by the bravery of British soldiers, Machen wrote a tale entitled The Bowmen, in which ghostly bowmen assist the British troops. So touching and morale boosting was this short story, that even when Machen wrote a full length book based on the idea and specifically noted that the Angels of Mons had never appeared on a battlefield, people were angry. They did not want to know that this was a fictional tale, and rejected the reality that it was outright. Even though the internet easily debunks it, this unintentional hoax survives to this day.

Please welcome Marby, this is her first article. Going full throttle starting in Jan! – Sami

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• Percy Fawcett and The Lost City of Z

Colonel Percy Fawcett had a lifelong passion for the esoteric and exploration.  In 1893, while exploring Ceylon‘s jungles, he discovered a large boulder with strange inscriptions.  He was eventually told that they were a form of script that only a handful of Buddhist monks could understand.  The idea of a lost civilization hiding just beyond what had been explored in the jungles captivated him to the point that it led to his 1925 disappearance in the Amazon.  It reads like a H.P. Lovecraft story: the occult, cannibal tribes, whispering spirits, and a lost Atlantean city.

In 1906, the 39-year-old Fawcett was sent to delimit the borders between Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador.  The area was unforgiving.  European rubber plantations would illegally enslave entire jungle villages and the cannibal natives would attack anything that entered their land.  Fawcett broke tradition by treating the natives with respect, providing them with gifts whenever he entered their land, and listened to their stories intently.

One of their stories about a lost golden city located within a 10-mile-valley within the Mato Grosso jungle where strange cold lights terrified men captivated him.  He started calling the city “Z” and through letters with other occultists like H. Rider Haggard and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle it was decided that natives were describing an Atlantean outpost. Haggard provided Fawcett with a small basalt statue with mysterious inscriptions that was claimed to have been found in a Brazilian lost city in 1913. Eventually Fawcett began to believe that the statue enabled him to connect with a female spirit called a “Sith” that was beckoning him to find Z.

In 1925, through funding from a group of supporters called “The Glove”, Fawcett set off to find Z with his son and a friend of his son’s.  Fawcett hoped to set up a Theosophist commune where his son would be worshipped as a god when he discovered Z.  Even though the small expedition was sick and badly equipped before they entered uncharted territories he was optimistic about what he would find.

It was the last time he was seen or heard from.

So what happened to Percy Fawcett?  Explanations about his fate range from simple to absolutely bizarre. On the simple side he was either eaten by wildlife, killed by hostile tribes, or had assimilated into one of the tribes. Sightings of blue eyed children became commonplace and many natives claimed to have seen him as late as the mid-’30s. Some remains were found in the jungle along with stories from the tribes that claimed to have killed Fawcett, but none ever turned out to be him. On the bizarre side are the UFOlogists, hollow earth theorists, and occultists.  According to them he was abducted by UFOs for discovering Atlantis or lived in an underground empire with 28 children, his eldest armed with a golden spear.  His family tried to reach him through psychics and claimed to be communicating with him as late as the ’40.  But he was never found dead or alive.

Maybe we will never know what happened to Colonel Percy or if Z ever existed. Maybe the best explanation is a mix: he went into the jungle motivated by native myths that surrounded a dead civilization, was brainwashed by his own occult beliefs about it having an Atlantean origin, and ended up dead somewhere along the line. The harsh Amazon jungle, which still hides many people that haven’t been contacted yet, made sure that his body was never found.  Or, maybe, somewhere within the Amazon jungles, he formed his own tribe in a lost city.

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Mysteries have always interested me. I was scared shitless during one visit to New Jersey after reading about the Jersey Devil and spent most of my time there making sure I stayed as far away from the woods as possible. This is a list of 7 bizarre, unsolved mysteries that I find interesting along with a possible explanation.

7 ) The Kelly-Hopkinsville Encounter

Not all alien invasion stories are created equal. In fact, all of them pale in comparison to the Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter because it involves rednecks, alien goblins, and guns. On the night of August 21, 1955, a Kentucky farmer went outside to get a drink of water and claimed to have seen a “flying saucer” crash in a nearby gully. Everyone laughed at him and suggested that he was either lying or hallucinating.

The Bizarre:

A few minutes later the group saw a three foot tall creature glide towards them. It had an over-sized head, pointy ears, glowing eyes, was dressed in silver metal, had large talons on its hands, and had them raised towards the sky. The group responded like any of us would: they grabbed their guns and started shooting at it. But it just somersaulted away and for the next few hours the group was harangued by a group of goblins that didn’t get hurt by gunfire and seemed to just want to peer inside the house.

Possible Explanation:

The best explanation is that they were shit-faced on moonshine and were shooting at owls. But the police was very adamant in stating that the group was not under the influence of alcohol and drugs and “sincere and sane and that they had no interest in exploiting the case for publicity.”

6 ) The Dancing Mania of Aachen

Not the Tito Puente album, but a craze that swept across Europe and lasted for about 300 years. On June 24, 1374, a large group of people started dancing through the streets of Aachen, Germany, engaging in orgies and screaming about visions. They foamed at their mouths, talked in tongues, and kept dancing even after collapsing from exhaustion. It quickly caught on and rapidly spread through the rest of Europe.

The Bizarre:

Obvious Thriller joke aside, what made the entire scenario even better was the fact that the first solution was to attempt to pray away the mania. Large religious ceremonies were staged on counter the movement because it was thought to be a form of demonic possession. When that failed, anytime a dance mania would kick off musicians would accompany the afflicted in hopes that it would “treat” them.

Possible Explanation:

There are a few: Michael Jackson turned into a werecat after asking his girlfriend to go steady, ergot poisoning, or mass delusions. You decide which one you like better.

5 ) The Dyatlov Pass Accident

In something that the Blair Witch Project apparently ripped off, nine Russian cross-country skiers went on a trek through the Ural Mountains in 1959. They were forced to set up camp during a snow storm but something scared them enough to make a mad dash through the harsh subzero weather towards a nearby forest wearing practically nothing. Not surprisingly, all were found dead afterwards. None of them had any signs of outward trauma.

The Bizarre:

Since no Cher CDs were found it is unknown why they would dash into the snow to die, but other hikers in the area swear there were strange lights in the sky. Five were found to have died of simple hypothermia – it appears that they just ran out into the cold and froze to death – but four were found in strange circumstances: two had crushed ribs, one had a crushed skull, and one was missing her tongue. These four were dosed with radiation and families swear that their skin turned orange and their hair white.

Possible Explanation:

No tongue? FUCK! Aliens! Buzz-kills want us to believe that an avalanche or a weapons test gone wrong caused the deaths, but there is no evidence of either, and most records were lost after the fall of the USSR or are still sealed.

4 ) The Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 Hijacking

On November 24, 1971, a man that resembled Michael Douglas’ character in Falling Down sat down and requested a bourbon with soda. The man is D.B. Cooper and he is about to become an American legend. After lighting a cigarette he passed the stewardess a note saying that he’ll detonate a bomb if he isn’t given $200,000 in cash and four parachutes.

The Bizarre:

After the FBI gives him the money and parachutes, he straps it to himself and asks for the plane to go to Mexico City. After 45 minutes in the air he offers each of the stewardesses a $2,000 tip, opens a door in the back, and bails into the darkness and rain.

Possible Explanation:

He had balls that were made of diamonds. Expert experienced paratrooper and skydivers swear that there is no way he could have survived the jump but no body is ever found. A few people come forward, either claiming to be D.B. Cooper or claiming to know who he was, but DNA evidence disproves their claims.

3 ) The May Day Mystery

Every May 1st since 1981, a cryptic ad has been placed in the Arizona Daily Wildcat.

The Bizarre:

At first glance they are just gibberish, but analysis by fans has revealed that they seem to be laying out a story that involves The Orphanage, a secret society that is placing the ads, that wants to give away The Prize, which is a reward that is in a safe deposit box for whoever solves the mystery. The Orphanage transports White Rabbit/Wonder Bread, which are unknown items, and seem to have some obsession with Martin Luther because his image appears on a lot of the ads.

Possible Explanation:

The super-model-sexy explanation is that there is a super secret society that is trying to see if anyone out there is smart enough to crack their code. The seeing-your-grandmother-naked explanation is that the ads are placed by Robert Truman Hungerford, an eccentric lawyer that claims to be the legal counsel for “The Brotherhood”, and that he is bat shit insane.

2 ) The Max Headroom Signal Piracy Incident

On a typical Chicago night on November 22, 1987, someone wearing a Max Headroom mask managed to hijack a broadcast signal twice – once CBS and once PBS. Pirating a broadcast signal is incredibly hard. According to the FBI the cost of doing something like this could range from a couple thousand dollars to over $25,000.

The Bizarre:

The first intrusion took place while CBS was going through sports scores. “Max” appeared for about 30 seconds and swayed in front of a corrugated metal sheet until CBS killed his signal. The second intrusion took place while PBS was showing an episode of Doctor Who. “Max” appeared around 11:15 PM and started dancing around while saying random phrases. He then decided to moon the viewers and was spanked by someone wearing a dress with a flyswatter. Then the signal blacked out. It pissed off Doctor Who fans to the point that one remarked: “I got so upset that I wanted to bust the TV set… I really did.”

Possible Explanation:

The most badass one is that it was a bored hacker that wanted to show off his abilities. The not as awesome, but still interesting one is that someone had a grudge against the CBS station. The philosophical one is that he used Max Headroom because it was set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland ruled by TV corporations and freedom fighters spread their message by hijacking TV feeds. But either way, no one knows, because “Max” covered his trail extremely well and there is practically no evidence anymore.

1 ) The Lead Masks Case

Some crazy shit happens in Brazil, there are parts of Rio de Janeiro where pilots refuse to fly over out of fears that slum lords will shoot them down. So, it is only natural that mysterious deaths have to involve UFOs. On August 20, 1966, in Niteroi, the bodies of two healthy men in their 30s were found on a hilltop. Both men were wearing half-masks made of lead that covered the upper half of their faces. A notebook keeping diagrams and partially coded notes along with a strange letter was found with the bodies.

The Bizarre:

Lead masks aside, the autopsies revealed that both men were healthy and had died when their hearts just stopped beating. The notebook contained references to the Ohm equation and the letter appeared to be instructions to appear at the hilltop, swallow orange capsules, and to wait for the “promised sign.” Naturally, people came forward to claim that strange orange objects were hovering over the hilltop the same day. When investigators searched one of the men’s workshop they found a book that discussed scientific spiritualism in which passages dealing with masks and intense rays of light were marked.

Possible Explanation:

No Madonna CDs were found, so it isn’t sure why they were obsessed with rays of light. Theories about aliens, psychics, cults, etc started to spread but none had any evidence. The police closed the investigation saying: “I have no doubt they died of an experiment with psychic forces, for which they were ill-prepared and which turned out to be fatal.”

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