Japanese yokai, cryptids, urban legends, UFOs, mythical beasts and ancient mysteries, translated into English.
Entries: 431
The idea of using science and technology to enhance the abilities of the human body and brain and to overcome aging, disease and even death. The word spread in 1957, and while it draws attention with advances in AI and medicine, it is also told in conspiracy theories that "some people are trying to remake humanity."
A coined word combining "human" and "alien," referring to beings said to be human-alien hybrids. It became a topic after being introduced on the Japanese TV program Yarisugi Toshi Densetsu. They supposedly cannot be told apart by appearance and are said to have powers like telepathy.
A rocky mesa that looked like a human face in a photo taken in 1976 by NASA's Mars probe Viking 1. A theory spread that it was an artifact made by an ancient Martian civilization, but later high-resolution photos confirmed it was an ordinary hill.
A spring festival held in central and northern Europe on the night of April 30 into May 1. Legend says that on this night witches gather on Germany's Brocken mountain for a feast, a scene depicted in Goethe's Faust.
The July 1952 incident in which unidentified lights repeatedly appeared over Washington, D.C., the U.S. capital, and showed up on airport radar. Fighters were scrambled, and the Air Force held a major press conference explaining it as a weather phenomenon.
An urban legend that in 1943 the U.S. Navy conducted a secret experiment to make the destroyer USS Eldridge invisible, and that the ship vanished, teleported to another port, and crew members ended up fused into the walls. The Navy says no such experiment took place.
An urban legend that artificial structures like pyramids and towers exist on the surface of the Moon. Pointed shadows in photos from a 1960s lunar probe were presented as evidence, but they are thought to be the long shadows of rocks lit by a low sun.
An urban legend that an alien satellite has been orbiting the Earth for 13,000 years. A photo of a black object taken from the Space Shuttle was presented as evidence, but it is thought to have actually been a thermal blanket lost during a spacewalk.
The 1972 incident in which junior high school students in the Kera district of Kochi City, Kochi Prefecture, said they captured a small UFO. The silver, hat-shaped object reportedly vanished and reappeared each time they took it home. It is counted among Japan's three great UFO incidents.
The incident in April 1974 in Nikoro, Kitami, Hokkaido, in which a farmer said he encountered a small alien and an orange glowing disc and was taken inside the disc. He testified that he was taken again and again afterward, and it is sometimes counted among Japan's three great UFO incidents.
Accounts of being taken aboard a UFO by aliens and examined. They spread from the 1961 Hill case. "Missing time," a gap in memory, is said to be a feature, but psychology explains such accounts through sleep paralysis and memories created under hypnosis.
A phenomenon in which livestock such as cattle are found with parts such as the eyes, tongue or organs cut away and apparently drained of blood. It was frequent in 1970s America and attributed to aliens, but investigations explain it as animals and insects feeding after death.
A phenomenon in which crops such as wheat are flattened into circles or complex geometric patterns. Many were found in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s and were said to be UFO landing marks, but in 1991 two men came forward saying they had made them with planks and rope.
A group of gods in the Sumerian mythology of ancient Mesopotamia. In the 1970s the writer Zecharia Sitchin claimed they were "aliens from the planet Nibiru who created humanity," and the idea spread in the world of UFOs and conspiracy theories, but historians reject it.
A linen cloth in the cathedral of Turin, Italy, said to have wrapped the body of Jesus Christ. The faint image of a man's whole body appears on it. A 1988 dating test placed it in the Middle Ages, but how the image was made remains a mystery.
An urban legend that "Apollo 20, which never officially existed, found an ancient spaceship on the far side of the Moon with a female alien with a face like the Mona Lisa sleeping inside." It spread from videos posted online in 2007, but it is considered a fabrication.
An ancient clay jar containing a copper cylinder and an iron rod, found near Baghdad, Iraq. The "ancient battery" theory was published in 1938, and replicas producing a weak current made it famous. No wires have been found, and other uses such as storing scrolls are considered more likely.
The carved lid of the 7th-century sarcophagus of King Pakal, found in 1952 beneath the Temple of the Inscriptions at the Maya site of Palenque, Mexico. It caused a stir because the figure seems to be piloting a rocket. Mayanists read it as a scene of the king's death and rebirth.
A relief carved on the wall of a crypt in the Temple of Hathor at Dendera, Egypt, that looks like a giant light bulb. It was hailed as "proof of electricity in ancient Egypt," but Egyptologists read it as a mythological scene of a snake born from a lotus flower.
More than 300 stone spheres found in southern Costa Rica, Central America. The smallest are a few centimeters across, the largest over 2 m, weighing more than ten tons. Thought to have been made by the Diquis culture around AD 300–1500, they were inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2014.
