Elizabeth Hanes

1. Anti-Masonic Party Conspiracy theorists fueled the founding of this party in 1828, which was established to expose and dismantle the Freemason society across America. The party’s founders suspected the Masons of murdering William Morgan, a bricklayer who intended to publish a ...read more

1. Failed bandit Elmer McCurdy’s corpse had a more interesting life than the man did. In 1911, Elmer McCurdy mistakenly robbed a passenger train he thought contained thousands of dollars. The disappointed outlaw made off with just $46 and was shot by lawmen shortly thereafter. ...read more

1. The St. Valentine who inspired the holiday may have been two different men. Officially recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, St. Valentine is known to be a real person who died around A.D. 270. However, his true identity was questioned as early as A.D. 496 by Pope Gelasius ...read more

1. First artificial earth satellite: Sputnik The Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first manmade object to orbit the earth, on October 4, 1957, to little fanfare. In fact, the official Soviet news agency, Tass, didn’t announce the launch until the next day. Global reaction to ...read more

1. Giovanni Schiaparelli sees “channels” on the surface of Mars in 1877, and speculation runs rampant that intelligent beings created them. What a difference a word makes. When Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli peered through his telescope in 1877 to view the surface of ...read more

1. Skylab was made to go up but not to come back down. The space station known as Skylab was designed as an orbiting workshop for research on scientific matters, such as the effects of prolonged weightlessness on the human body. Because the project represented the next step ...read more

Theory #1: Earhart ran out of fuel, crashed and perished in the Pacific Ocean. This is one of the most generally accepted versions of the famous aviator’s disappearance. Many experts believe Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan got slightly off course en route to a refueling ...read more

Fred Noonan has been consigned to a historical footnote as Amelia Earhart‘s navigator. That’s partly because little is known about him. When he and Earhart vanished on July 2, 1937, headlines blared about the disappearance of “Lady Lindy” and the frantic search for her Lockheed ...read more

1. Three minutes to midnight: As the arms race gets underway, the clock hand inches forward in November 1949. When the Doomsday Clock debuted in 1947 as a cover design for the new magazine version of the newsletter-style Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the clock hand stood at ...read more

Until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, most American servicemen had never seen a plane like the “Zero,” so named not because of the prominent Rising Sun emblem painted on the side but for the manufacturer’s type designation: Mitsubishi 6M2 Type 0 Model 21. Those servicemen ...read more

1. May 22, 1957: Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico Albuquerque residents enjoying a spring day on May 22, 1957, found themselves literally rocked by what felt like a nuclear explosion. They weren’t far off. No one knows precisely what happened aboard the B-36 aircraft ...read more