Top 100 Wikipedia Rabbit Holes

Nine Soviet hikers died on a Ural mountain pass in 1959 under circumstances so strange that the Russian state reopened the case in 2019. Tents cut from the inside, fatal injuries with no external wounds.

A 72-second narrowband radio signal received by Ohio State's Big Ear telescope in 1977. Astronomer Jerry Ehman circled the printout and wrote 'Wow!' in the margin. Never detected again.

Early-15th-century codex in an unknown script with illustrations of plants that exist nowhere on earth. Resists every cryptanalysis attempt; lives at Yale's Beinecke Library.

Jaynes's 1976 theory that human consciousness arose only ~3000 years ago — earlier humans had a 'bicameral mind' that heard one half of their brain as gods speaking to them.

A micronation declared on a WWII anti-aircraft platform off the English coast. Issues passports, fends off naval incursions, has its own royal family, an official soccer team.

Mysterious mosaic plaques embedded in roads across the US and South America since the 1980s, all bearing a cryptic message about Jupiter, Stanley Kubrick, and Arnold Toynbee.

1872 brigantine found drifting in the Atlantic with the cargo intact, lifeboat gone, captain's family vanished — never satisfactorily explained.

A 1908 explosion in remote Siberia that flattened 2150 km² of forest. Caused by an asteroid or comet that exploded in the air; the largest impact event in recorded history.

A massive subglacial lake under Antarctica's ice, sealed off for ~15 million years. Russian drilling teams reached it in 2012; possibly contains never-before-known life.

A 2000-year-old Greek analogue computer recovered from a Roman-era shipwreck. Calculated astronomical positions to a precision unmatched until the 14th century.

Post-WWII US program that secretly recruited 1600 Nazi scientists — including Wernher von Braun and the rocket team that put Apollo on the moon.

CIA covert program (1953-73) testing LSD, sensory deprivation, hypnosis, and torture on unwitting subjects. Most documents destroyed in 1973 on orders of director Richard Helms.

Victorian England's most-followed legal drama — a butcher in Australia claimed to be the long-lost heir to a baronetcy. Three-year trial; he was wrong but millions believed him.

Around 400 people in Strasbourg danced uncontrollably for weeks; dozens died of exhaustion. Mass hysteria, ergot poisoning, religious cult — historians still debate.

Theoretical biology framework for how life self-organises out of chemistry. The 'why does anything alive exist at all' rabbit hole.

Anonymous internet puzzle series (2012-14) recruiting cryptographers. Mixed Mayan numerology, prime number theory, and physical drops at GPS coordinates. Still unsolved at the deepest level.

Stream of nonsense Usenet posts from 1996 with random capitalised words. Was it an AI experiment, an espionage cipher, or a glitch? Nobody knows.

Ray Bradbury short story used as the conceptual frame for many futurism conversations — the idea that 'a vision of the future can will it into being'.

A thought experiment from LessWrong claiming a future omniscient AI might retroactively punish anyone who failed to bring it into being. Banned for years for being psychologically harmful.

Lays its eggs in other species' nests; the chicks evict the hosts' offspring. A perfect 'nature is not your friend' Wikipedia portal.

16 photoreceptor types vs human 3. They see polarised light, circularly polarised light, and a colour spectrum we can't even imagine.

Microscopic animals that survive being boiled, frozen, irradiated, and shot into space. The most resilient form of life ever discovered.

Parasitic fungus that hijacks an insect's nervous system, forces it to climb high, and erupts from its head. Source material for The Last of Us.

A single 'tree' in Utah that's actually one clonal organism — 47,000 stems sharing a single root system. ~80,000 years old.

Fish that live at 8000+ metres in the Mariana Trench. Specialized cell structures prevent them from being crushed by 800× atmospheric pressure.

The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft drifted very slightly slower than gravity predicted. Decades of physics debate ended with thermal radiation as the (boring) answer.

If the universe is so vast, where is everyone? Decades of attempted explanations — Great Filters, dark forests, zoo hypothesis, simulation arguments.

A thermodynamic argument that you're statistically more likely to be a randomly fluctuated brain in a near-empty universe than a real evolved human. Cosmological vertigo.

Why did art, religion, and complex tools all appear ~50,000 years ago, when humans had been anatomically modern for 150,000+ years? Still unresolved.

Massive stone-circle complex in southeastern Turkey, built ~9500 BC by pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers. Rewrote our understanding of when civilisation began.

Earth's climate plunged back into ice-age conditions ~12,800 years ago. The cause — comet impact? meltwater pulse? — is one of the great climate-history puzzles.

The 180km-wide crater off Mexico that ended the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Buried under sediment until oil-company gravity surveys revealed it in the 1980s.

Two flashes detected by a US satellite in 1979 over the southern Indian Ocean — almost certainly a covert Israeli-South African nuclear test. Officially still classified as inconclusive.

Heribert Illig's fringe theory that ~300 years of medieval history (614-911 AD) were fabricated. Not supported by evidence but a great rabbit-hole gateway.

Mass false memory phenomenon — people misremember Mandela dying in prison, the Berenstain Bears spelling, Pikachu's tail. A great cognitive-science portal.

Wikipedia article on the strange phenomenon of analogue clocks running counterclockwise in specific places — Bolivian congress, certain Italian cathedrals, etc.

Cryptid said to live in the Gobi desert. Spits acid, kills by electric shock, looks like a sausage. Featured in expedition diaries from the 1920s onward.

Victorian-era folkloric attacker who leapt impossible distances, breathed blue flame, and terrorised London for decades. Likely several copycats; never identified.

A 2000 Bigfoot 'body imprint' cast from a Washington forest. Either the most compelling Bigfoot evidence ever or a particularly comfy elk wallow.

17,000-year-old paleolithic art in southwestern France. The 'Hall of the Bulls' is the most-reproduced cave-art tableau in history.

115 English colonists vanished from a Virginia colony in 1587. The only clue: 'CROATOAN' carved into a post. Theories range from assimilation to mass starvation.

1846 wagon train trapped in the Sierra Nevada. Members resorted to cannibalism to survive; only about half made it out alive. The pioneer-era nightmare.

Mathematical theorem that a solid 3D ball can be cut into a finite number of pieces and reassembled into two solid balls of the same size. True under the Axiom of Choice.

A 3D shape with finite volume but infinite surface area. You can fill it with paint but never paint its surface.

Thought experiment showing how infinity behaves differently from large finite numbers. A fully booked hotel with infinite rooms can always accept more guests.

Are problems whose solutions can be quickly verified the same class as problems that can be quickly solved? The biggest open question in computer science. $1M prize.

Every even integer greater than 2 is the sum of two primes. Verified for huge numbers; nobody can prove it.

Turing's proof that no algorithm can determine in general whether an arbitrary program halts. The foundational theorem of computability.

Any sufficiently powerful formal system contains true statements that cannot be proven within it. Broke Hilbert's dream of a complete mathematics.

Short story imagining a library containing every possible 410-page book of 25 characters. Implemented as a real searchable website at libraryofbabel.info.

Luigi Serafini's 1981 illustrated encyclopedia written in an indecipherable invented script. Italian surrealism at its most committed.

Magician Harry Houdini died at 52 after a Montreal student punched him in the stomach following his appendix-rupture lecture. Spiritualists claimed his ghost would communicate.

Railroad worker who survived a metre-long iron rod passing through his frontal lobe in 1848. His personality changed forever — the canonical case in neuroscience.

Henrietta Lacks's cancer cells were taken without consent in 1951 and became the first immortal human cell line. They've outweighed her body 30,000× over by now.

Concept describing how vague public incitement can predictably produce lone-wolf violence without direct coordination. Increasingly relevant to modern political analysis.

Zimbardo's 1971 study that 'showed' ordinary people become abusive in authority roles. Largely debunked in subsequent decades but still in every Psych 101 textbook.

Yale study (1961) demonstrating how readily people obey authority and inflict apparent harm. The classic post-Nuremberg social psychology study.

Murder case that gave rise to the bystander effect concept. The actual sequence of events was substantially less clear-cut than legend suggests.

St Louis modernist housing project demolished only 16 years after opening — its destruction in 1972 became the symbolic 'end of modernism' in architecture.

1986 nuclear-reactor explosion in Ukraine. Detailed reactor physics, evacuation timelines, and the bizarre micro-stories of the liquidators make this a deep portal.

The classical puzzle plus the legend of monks moving 64 gold discs to end the world. Solution takes 2^64-1 moves — about 585 billion years.

Cellular automaton with simple rules that produces gliders, oscillators, spaceships, even Turing-complete computation. The most-studied toy of complexity science.

The most famous fractal — infinite complexity emerging from z := z² + c. The portal into chaos theory for most non-mathematicians.

How dust around a young star self-organised into planets, asteroid belts, gas giants, and moons. The Grand Tack hypothesis, late heavy bombardment, etc.

Park ranger struck by lightning seven times across his life and survived all of them. Eventually died by suicide at 71. The Guinness record nobody wanted.

Ghost town that's been on fire underground since 1962. The mine fire is expected to keep burning for 250 years. Inspired the Silent Hill movie.

Abandoned concrete-island former coal-mining city off Nagasaki, Japan. Inspired the Skyfall Bond villain lair. UNESCO-listed.

Soviet-Ukrainian city built for Chernobyl plant workers; evacuated 36 hours after the accident. Now a tourist destination and time capsule.

Physicist Ludwig Boltzmann's grave in Vienna bears his statistical-mechanics formula S = k log W carved into the marble. A pilgrimage site.

Itinerant Hungarian mathematician who lived out of a suitcase, published 1500 papers, and defined the Erdős number — a shibboleth of math collaboration.

Self-taught Indian mathematician who derived breakthroughs about partition functions while dying of TB at 32. His notebooks still yield results a century later.

Russian mathematician who solved the Poincaré conjecture, then declined both the Fields Medal and a $1M Millennium Prize. Lives reclusively in St Petersburg.

Wikipedia rabbit hole: every Stevie Wonder album from Talking Book through Songs in the Key of Life. Just lose an hour.

Eccentric Serbian-American inventor — alternating current, radio, wireless power. Died in 1943 surrounded by pigeons in a New York hotel.

Mathematical genius, code-breaker, AI pioneer. Persecuted for his sexuality and died of cyanide poisoning at 41. Posthumously pardoned in 2013.

Iron-rich ancient subglacial water that bleeds red from a glacier in Taylor Valley. Looks like a wound — the source took a century to fully understand.

Natural-gas crater in Turkmenistan that's been burning continuously since 1971. Soviet geologists lit it expecting it to burn off in days.

Small natural-gas seep behind a waterfall in upstate New York that flickers eternally. Found in 1860s; persists despite the geology not really making sense.

Phenomenon where attempting to hide information results in it spreading far wider. Named after Barbra Streisand's 2003 suit over an aerial photo of her house.

Alonzo Church's formal system that, alongside Turing machines, defined what's computable. The theoretical basis of functional programming.

If a ship has every plank replaced over time, is it still the same ship? Ancient philosophy puzzle that maps onto modern identity, transporters, and ML model versioning.

Philippa Foot's thought experiment about diverting a runaway trolley. Spawned millions of memes and the entire field of self-driving-car ethics.

Outsized impact of rare, hard-to-predict events. Reframed risk thinking after 2008 and is now embedded in everyday strategic-planning vocabulary.

Robin Dunbar's claim that humans have cognitive capacity for stable relationships with ~150 people. The number behind small-team theory and Slack-channel limits.

Originated in a 1973 Stockholm bank-robbery hostage situation. The diagnostic validity has been seriously questioned ever since.

Cameroonian crater lake that released a CO2 cloud in 1986, suffocating 1746 people. The lake is now degassed by engineered vent pipes.

America's first space station (1973-79). Crashed back to Earth scattering debris across Australia; the Shire of Esperance fined NASA $400 for littering.

The phonograph record on Voyager 1 and 2 carrying sounds and images of Earth. Greetings in 55 languages, Chuck Berry, Bach, whale song.

Shortwave radio stations broadcasting strings of numbers and codes since WWII. Almost certainly espionage one-time-pad communication. Some still active.

1962 false-flag proposal by US Joint Chiefs to stage terrorist attacks blamed on Cuba. JFK rejected it; the documents declassified in 1997 are extraordinary reading.

Himalayan glacial lake with the skeletons of 600-800 people from c. 800 AD, who all appear to have died from blunt impacts to the head — likely massive hail.

The last Pinta Island tortoise — believed to be the last of his species. Died in 2012 in the Galapagos despite decades of breeding attempts.

Theory that a 74,000-year-old super-eruption nearly drove humanity extinct, leaving genetic bottlenecks visible today. Increasingly contested in recent years.

The actual Oklahoma high point at 1516m. Sharing a name with the Half-Life facility makes it a Wikipedia pilgrimage for gamers.

Royal yacht decommissioned in 1997 and now a tourist attraction in Edinburgh. Every detail of her interior was personally chosen by the Queen.

1950s underground city in Wiltshire built for the British government to survive nuclear war. 35 acres, 60 miles of roads. Decommissioned in 2004.

Longest-running lab experiment — pitch dripping at the University of Queensland since 1927. Eleven drops have fallen in nearly a century.

Antoni Gaudí's Barcelona basilica, under construction since 1882. Expected to complete in 2026 — the 100th anniversary of Gaudí's death.

13th-century manuscript so large two people are needed to lift it. Includes a full-page illustration of the Devil. Legend says one monk wrote it in a single night.

The url that opens a uniformly random Wikipedia article. The original 'one more click' rabbit hole — Wikipedia's own portal into itself.