We all watch movies like National Treasure and secretly hope that something cool like that might actually be out there in the world or even better that it might, out of some cosmic chance, actually happen to us.

David Martin of England had a small bit of such wishful awesomeness fall into his lap when he began renovating his 17th century fireplace. Inside the chimney were the remains of a pigeon….but not just any pigeon…

David Martin uncovered the remains of a carrier pigeon…and not just ANY old remains of some random carrier pigeon…

These particular remains were attached to a small red cylindrical container…and not just ANY small red cylindrical container…oh no, kids…Mr. Martin had found the remains of a World War II carrier pigeon that was still clutching a little red container which held a small, cigarette paper-sized encrypted message!

Martin found this mysterious container in 1982 and sent it off to have it solved. Intelligence officials believed that it was impossible to break because the code books from back then that might hold the answers to this particular code had been lost or gone missing.

Addressed to the mysterious “X02” from the more mysterious “Sjt W Stot”, the message, sent during the Allied invasion, continues to baffle codebreakers who are working on the message. Bletchly Park, once a highly secretive location where the Nazi’s Enigma Code was broken and now features a museum about pigeons’ role in the war, has more than 30 messages carried by pigeon and not a single one is written in code which causes many of those involved to believe that this message was of utmost importance and urgency.

Just how important was the information this little bad-assed bird o’ war was carrying?

When Martin showed the bird to a counter-espionage specialist who was actually THE inspiration for Ian Fleming’s infamous agent 007?

“When I showed the bird and code, the blood drained from his face and he advised us to back off. He said nothing would ever be published.”

[Discovery News]

What you’re looking at isn’t the newest trend in ‘crop-circling’. The thing that created this spectacular-looking sand sculpture isn’t an alien trying to communicate with humankind, either.

The master craftsman behind this amazing looking design is something far less scary and almost kind of adorable.

Yoji Ookota, an office worker who left his cubicle life to pursue his love of underwater photography, recently discovered something that no one had seen until his camera caught sight of it.

A six-foot-wide, elaborate geometric shape 80 feet under the surface of the water on the sea floor. Then he began to spot more of them. Ookota dubbed them the ‘mystery circles’.

As Ookota began to study the circles to find out how they were created, he found the culprit.

An adorable little male puffer fish.

In an amazing display of engineering and the need to be loved, the male puffer fish uses its fins and works day and night to create these things in order to attract females to mate with them. Once the puffer fish creates the ridges, males have even been seen filling their mouths with shells and blowing them onto the ridges they created like they were doing some primitive, animal form of bedazzling.

Females, attracted by the final design, join the male in the center of the design and mate. Later on the female returns to the center of the ‘mystery circle’ and lays her eggs.

These ‘mystery circles’ aren’t just for decoration either. Those shells used to ‘bedazzle’ the ridges appear to serve as nutrients to the young fish when they hatch. According to the most recent research, the design isn’t just for decoration and attracting a mate. The design also features a small bit of engineering. Scientists are discovering that the ridges also serve to protect the eggs from predators and currents that could scatter the eggs across the ocean floor.

This fish has more motivation and interior design abilities than most guys we know.

Weirdly amazing.

[Spoon & Tamago]

We’ve seen a LOT of weird things before in the medical field. But THIS? This is a whole new level.

Back in 2009 a woman by the name of Shanyna Isom had an asthma attack. No biggie, right? Wrong. Isom experienced an allergic reaction to the steriods used to treat the asthma attack.

The result? A reaction like a d-lister from the Xavier Institute…she’s growing fingernails where she would normally grow hair.

No…really…fingernails are sprouting from her body.

Johns Hopkins University doctors are baffled at the condition. There’s no precedent for what’s happening to Isom. She began growing skin cells at 12 times the rate of a normal person and each follicle began producing a fingernail!

Doctors seem to have the bizarre disorder under control and are working to figure out how to fix whatever strange effect the steroid treatment created which caused this entire mess to start in the first place.
[I09]

On July 2, 1937 Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan set out in Earhart’s plane, the Electra, to circumnavigate the world at the equator…and vanished.

Their disappearance has been mentioned in everything from historical documentaries on plane crashes to shows about the paranormal where conspiracies abound about shadowy government projects and even alien abduction.

While most people agree that the Electra simply ran out of fuel, The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) has spent the last twenty-four years and nine expeditions to Earhart and Noonan’s last known location in an attempt to find out exactly what happened on that historic journey around the world.

In 1940 artifacts surfaced, renewed interest in the search and were then subsequently lost leading to rumors of a government cover-up and a slew of conspiracy theories.

Recently, pieces of a significant artifact, an anti-freckle cream jar (Earhart had freckles and it was well known that she wasn’t happy about it) turned up. Now, armed with new technologiy, preparations are underway and another expedition is about to commence. TIGHAR is hoping that this search will reveal all of the missing pieces to this seventy-five-year-old mystery.

As of this writing, TIGHAR is in the midst of a three day symposium discussing the flight, its disappearance and what may have actually happened in the final days of a trip that’s still yet to reach its conclusion.

[Discovery News]

A corporate jet pilot nearly collided with what he said looked like a remote controlled vehicle over Denver Monday evening. But no one will take credit for the mysterious airborne menace.

Law enforcement says their were no drones in the air. The local RC club says that members are forbidden from flying craft that high as they would otherwise cause this kind of commotion.

The pilot is heard telling air traffic control: “A remote controlled aircraft, or what? Something just went by the other way … About 20 to 30 seconds ago. It was like a large remote-controlled aircraft.

The corporate jet, a Cessna Citation 525 CJ1, was flying at 8,000 feet above sea level over Cherry Creek when the mystery object came close enough to make any pilot nervous.

What else could it be? UFO? Pterodactyl?

In our mind, there is only one culprit. Drogon is loose from the pits of Meereen!

[9News]

You watch a massive glowing object fall into a lake. What could it be? UFO? Fat ghost? A plane make entirely out of glow-in-the-dark plastic?

Whatever it is, we are going to keep guessing because a search of the lake is plummeted into hasn’t turned up anything.

The Republican-American of Waterbury reports that a person driving in Litchfield at about 2 a.m. Tuesday reported that an object the size of a whale fell from the sky and crashed into Bantam Lake. Officials say that at about the same time, a state trooper 10 miles away in Warren called dispatchers to report that something fell out of the sky and landed near Bantam or Morris.

Morris fighters made several passes up and down the lake in a boat looking for a possible plane crash, but didn’t find any debris.

Authorities called off the search, leaving the mystery unsolved.

Astronomers might have the answer, they say a meteor shower occurred that evening. It still doesn’t answers why it was glowing as if it just got out from a rave.

[Fox News]

One week ago today, several residents of Clintonville, WI heard a series of big booms throughout the town. Beginning at 2 a.m. and continuing until 8 p.m. Monday many residents initially called in reports ranging from a car crashing into a house to ice falling off a roof, only to find no physical evidence.

Yet the booms kept coming.

They’ve since received an official explanation. An extremely rare 1.5 magnitude earthquake shook the town shortly after 5 a.m. Tuesday, concluded the United States Geological Service.

But that doesn’t quite explain what the noises were Monday.

I have a theory…

[Fox 11]

As was discussed in our latest podcast, here is the unadjusted photo taken by the insanely talented Trey Ratcliff. Click AFTER THE JUMP to see if you correctly spotted the crazy face.

[Stuck in Customs] (more…)

It creeps, silently.

The orange goo off the coast of the remote Alaskan town of Kivalina is a mystery that could turn ugly. Not only do residents have no idea what the substance is, if it turns out to be harmful to the fishing, hunting or agriculture industries it could be dangerous. Towns like Kivalina are nearly 100% self-sufficient since travel can be so hazardous during winter time.

As of now experts can only rule out that the goo is a petroleum based or man-made chemical. The world is also still out on if it’s a sentient race of alien.

[Fox News]

Residents near Gainesville, GA have reported loud booms and streaks across the sky. Dobbins Air Force Base said they do not know anything about it, but they are looking into the issue.

AccessNorthGa.com received calls between 10:00 and 11:00, the first about 10:40 from the McEver Road/Browns Bridge Road area. The caller said it shook her house and wondered if it might have been a sonic boom, caused by a jet breaking the sound barrier.

A second caller, a few minutes later, said he was sitting by his pool on Mountain View Road, which is off McEver, and saw a “streak across the sky,” followed by the loud noise, leading to some speculation that it was a sonic boom caused by a meteor entering the earth’s atmosphere.

Lt. Col. James Wilson, a spokesman for Dobbins Air Reserve Base, said the noise was probably not caused by a plane approaching or leaving the base, which is in Marietta. He said the Dobbins flight schedule does not indicate any aircraft would have been passing through the area at that time.

[AccessNorthGA]

A mysterious ripple on Lake Washington has locals scratching their heads. I love how the reporter throws NOAA under the bus at the end.

[King5 via The Mysterialist]

“It’s just really, really weird,” said Jerry Vinski, director of nearby Raritan Valley Community College’s planetarium, who conducted tests on the site. “We dug around and couldn’t find anything. We used metal detectors because all meteors have metal in them, and we couldn’t find anything, large or small.”

[Daily Record]

A few friends go hiking in the Russian wilderness on an early February night in 1959. The Ural Mountain area is desolate, but not unmanageable for these nine veteran hikers.

On a larger scale, the Soviet Union continues to ascend in global power. Cuba is weeks away from succumbing to Communist revolution. Secrecy and corruption in all levels of government continue to run unchecked in an Iron Curtain system which it’s own citizens don’t dare question and the rest of the world fears.

Those nine hikers were found dead. Two of them had fractured skulls. Many of them were in various states of undress. One of them had her tongue ripped out of her mouth. All of their clothes had trace levels of radiation.

Their tent was ripped open. From the inside.

What were they trying to get away from? Were they running from something? Or someone? Did top secret chemical weapons testing cause them to go psychotic? Did a group of indigenous people brutally, torture and murder the friends?

Why was the subsequent investigation sealed under high level secrecy for decades?

The intervening 52 years haven’t provided hard answers, but there are plenty of theories ranging from UFOs to high-tech military testing.

The snow swept scenery is now called Dyatlov Pass in memory of Igor Dyatlov, the leader of those who died under such odd circumstances. Read about them AFTER THE JUMP… (more…)

Scottish police are investigating a mysterious explosion in Garadhban Forest in Gartocharn about 20 miles northwest of Glasgow.

Officials responding to the report “discovered some damage to the wooded area within the forest that would suggest some short of explosion had occurred,” the statement said.

Meteor? Mystery Missile? Wood Goblins? What do you think it is?

[CNN]

Elephant? Or shrew? Shrelephant? Elephew?

The mystery rages on in wild Kenya.

[Live Science]

You’re on a boat (in the T-Painian milieu) off the coast of Fort Lauderdale. All of a sudden a random periscope pops up and looks you right in the face. You look back.

It recedes in the water. But no one will own up to owning the sub or being there when you saw it. Secret military mission? Gaudy millionaire hunting pirates? Psychedelic party submersible?

[Sun-Sentinel]