U-2 and OXCART spy plane flights from Area 51 accounted for more than half of all UFO reports in the US during the late 1950s and 1960s. Project Blue Book’s actual job was to figure out which UFO sightings were their own classified aircraft. The government chose aliens as a cover story because no official body would ever confirm it. The planes were stranger than the fiction.
Being ignored activates the same region of your brain as physical pain. A 2003 UCLA study put people in brain scanners and had a computer ghost them. Their pain centres lit up. And a common painkiller measurably reduced hurt feelings. Your brain does not especially distinguish between a stubbed toe and a stubbed social standing.
In January 1911 Marie Curie was the most decorated scientist in France. The French Academy of Sciences voted against admitting her by two votes, then voted 90 to 52 to bar all women permanently. She responded by refusing to let them publish her work for a decade. Later that same year she won her second Nobel Prize. France did not admit a woman to the Academy until 1979.
Notre Dame de Paris took 182 years to build, spanning at least seven master builders, none of whom saw it finished. When the first stone was laid in 1163, Saladin had not yet been born, the Magna Carta was 52 years away, and the Aztec Empire would not exist for another 265 years. The flying buttress was invented during construction to solve a problem nobody anticipated.
A study found that 12 seconds of silent interview footage predicted hiring decisions to a statistically significant degree. Nearly 60 percent of interview decisions are made within the first 15 minutes of a 30-minute interview. The brain does not evaluate after the first impression forms. It justifies. Here is what that means for everyone in the room.
Columbus never set foot on the North American continent across four voyages. He landed in the Caribbean, believed he was in Asia until he died, and the continent is named after someone else because he refused to accept he had found anything new. The first European to reach North American soil was Leif Eriksson, 500 years earlier.
In 1999 David Dunning and Justin Kruger showed that people who perform worst consistently rate themselves highest. The popular version of this finding is about other people. The actual finding is that it applies to everyone, that experts are not exempt, and that knowing about the bias does not help you avoid it.
The claim that the Great Wall of China is visible from space was written in 1754, 215 years before anyone went to space. Every astronaut who has specifically looked for it from orbit has reported they could not see it. The Wall is 6 metres wide. At 400 kilometres altitude, that is below the resolution threshold of the human eye.
Teaching at Oxford began in 1096. The Aztec Empire was not founded until 1428, making Oxford 332 years older. Students were sitting examinations in Oxford while the Aztec empire was at its height. The two worlds simply had not met yet. Here is what else was happening in 1096 when Oxford opened its doors.
