Existence is a funny thing. How did we come to be, and where are we going? What’s out there? How can we know so much and yet, so little? How can there be endless breadsticks?
Well, I’ve compiled a short list of some very interesting things that we, as a species, cannot find conclusive answers for. From things in the ethereal realm of outer space to those found on our humble Earth, I’m going to rattle off some of the more curious and compelling phenomena we humans have encountered, but for which we have no solid explanation.
Listed in no particular order, here we go.
In the ‘70s, the University of Ohio was on the hunt for aliens. Not in the sense of your drunken cousin running around with a baseball bat in the woods, who swears he was abducted and probed after he passed out behind the bar and woke up in a truck with a sore ass—no. They’d constructed a giant radio telescope and decided to scan the heavens for possible contact. Dubbed the "Big Ear," it was used for their efforts to search for extraterrestrial life, which were met with a lot of nothing in terms of results. That is, until August 15th of 1977. That day, they received a very strong signal from roughly the Sagittarius constellation, which lasted for a solid 72 seconds and had all the hallmarks of being a deliberately sent signal. It’s called the "Wow! signal" because the researcher, Jerry Ehrman, wrote "Wow!" next to the recorded paper transcript of the signal.
Many believe this was an effort by aliens to contact us, perhaps deliberately, or perhaps we just got the equivalent of accidentally getting an interstellar trucker CB call about needing to use the toilet. Suffice it to say this signal, and its purported origin and purpose, have been the source of much debate over the years. They searched the same area of space to find a similar broadcast over and over and over again, but to no avail. Skeptics claim that it lacked modulation, which most all deliberately transmitted signals have, with even Mr. Ehrman, who discovered it, suggesting it could have been an Earth signal which bounced off some space junk. However, he redacted that statement some years later, stating that it’s the most likely candidate anyone has ever seen for an extraterrestrial transmission. I guess he was a little depressed the first time around. Many other radio telescopes have tried to locate the signal again in the years since, with no luck. In 2012, I guess we got annoyed, so the famous Arecibo Observatory beamed out an excessively powerful signal back to that location, consisting of 10,000 Twitter messages. If you’ve ever been on Twitter, you’ll know that this was probably an attempt to really piss off any space aliens who might be out there.
The Voynich Manuscript is a large, 240-page tome, written on parchment, which contains strange glyphs or letters, as well as an abundance of confusing diagrams and drawings. It was first discovered in the 17th century by a Czech alchemist, who’d had it in his library...though he did not know where it’d come from, he couldn’t make any sense of it and sold it as soon as he could. It has since gone on to become one of the most enduring mysteries of the modern age. In the time since its discovery, the manuscript has been analyzed by scholars, linguists, and historians over the centuries. Science has carbon-dated the manuscript to the early 1500s, and analysis shows that the ink and paints are consistent with that time, but that’s where the facts end. Thousands of linguists and cryptographers have tried to figure out if perhaps it’s a code to be cracked, but without success. Given the fact that, at the time, you couldn’t just go to Ye Olde Depot of Office and get a 500-page pack of parchment for a couple of ducats, it would have been extraordinarily expensive to put together, which limits its authorship to someone with wealth and time...or perhaps the backing of someone like that. But still, its purpose remains unknown. Is it a lost language? Maybe a created language made just for the book? Is it a joke? A hoax? Secret knowledge? A cookbook? A journal? Those are all hypotheses that have been put forth over the ages, and thus far, nobody knows for sure.
In central New Mexico lies the sleepy, artistic community known as Taos. A certain percentage of the residents of Taos can hear a distinctive hum in their ears at all times, which has no known source. It’s been described as a "low, throbbing background noise" and seems not to coincide with any man-made or natural phenomena. Unlike the hum in your ears after you drink too much and wake up on the floor of a Denny’s bathroom, it’s got a constant, rhythmic characteristic, apparently like cicadas in your brain. Those who can hear it, some 2% of the local population, describe it as nearly akin to tinnitus, but it is not a permanent condition. You can travel away from Taos and no longer be plagued by The Hum™, which makes me wonder why afflicted people don’t simply do that. The causes have been speculated as related to the power grid, resonances of lightning-induced electromagnetic radiation trapped between the ionosphere and Earth, the US Navy’s ELF Project (Extremely Low Frequency, used to communicate with submarines), and plain-old auditory hallucinations. However, after decades of study, nobody has been able to reach a solid conclusion. Similar hum effects have been observed in other places, such as Auckland, New Zealand, Windsor, Ontario, and St. Louis, Missouri. It continues to make people question their sanity to this very day.
In Vancouver, British Columbia, there exist a number of wonderful sights and attractions. Among the places to go is the lovely Salish Sea; however, it has a small problem. Feet, bereft of legs, though sometimes having shoes, wash up along the beaches with alarming frequency. Imagine walking along the coast, enjoying life, and then eating sand after being tripped by a disembodied foot. This happens. By and large, people attribute it to organized crime, shipwrecks, or the simple decomposition of drowning victims. That said, there’s no real, conclusive proof, and even after scientific study, the verdict seems to be "feet happen, eh." It is of note that none of the feet have been wearing Crocs; whether that speaks for or against their value as footwear, I cannot say.
Okay, this is a weird one, but from a technical perspective, we don’t actually know that time exists. Sure, any of you are gonna read that and say, "The fuck it doesn’t. I gotta get up at 7 a.m. every day," or some shit, and yes, you might, and Isaac Newton would agree with you. His vision of the universe held time as a "universally ticking clock," which just goes on and on in a linear fashion, like your uncle at a barbecue once he’s had a few. However, Einstein (Albert, of course, not his brother Steve) proposed that time is elastic and can shrink or expand, depending on circumstance, much as your old pair of Hanes does after a cold or hot day. Some modern physicists even suggest that time doesn’t exist but is instead a series of events which are the projected occurrences of past, present, and future, colliding with our perspective in a way that we can understand, driven by something called "quantum gravity." Heavy. Time itself might be a complete lie, but sadly, that doesn’t get us out of having to get up for work in the morning, so set your alarm.
So, there are some of the mysteries of existence. Kinda weird to think you could hear an internal hum in your head while stumbling over a foot on a beach and perceiving time in a non-linear fashion, but here we are.
Stay mystified,
-Wombstretcha
Wombstretcha the Magnificent is a cryptic manuscript enthusiast, space alien detractor, watch owner, writer, and retired rapper from Portland, OR. He can be found at Wombstretcha.com, on Twitter as @Wombstretcha503 and on Facebook (boo!) and MeWe (yay!) as "Wombstretcha The Magniflcent."
