Book of Kells

Coat of arms of the Indies Company, with the reclining figure representing the Mississippi River taken from Law's Compagnie d'Occident , and the motto Florebo quocumque ferar taken from Louis XIV's East India Company

Corybantian dance , the type of dance most likely danced on Gymnopedia festivals (image from Smith 's Dictionary of Antiquities ).

Kurt Debus (front row, third from the left), a former V-2 rocket scientist and SS officer who became a NASA director, sitting between US president John F. Kennedy and US vice president Lyndon B. Johnson in 1962 at a briefing at Blockhouse…

Created around 800 CE on the island of Iona, the Book of Kells contains 680 vellum pages in which no two decorated initials repeat — hidden faces, serpents, and cats nursing kittens emerge under magnification, invisible to the naked eye.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn

IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was hauled off an Air France plane at JFK in his underwear, May 2011, accused by hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo of assault — ending the near-certain next presidency of France.

Balfour Declaration

Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour wrote 67 words to Lord Rothschild in 1917, promising a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Those 67 words are still quoted in international courts more than a century later.

John Law's Company

John Law — a Scottish gambler who killed a man in a duel — convinced France to replace gold with paper backed by Louisiana swampland. Within two years, the word 'millionaire' was coined, then the crash.

Gymnopaedia

At the Gymnopaedia, naked Spartan youths danced in full summer sun on the Spartan agora for days — a festival honoring the dead of Thyreatis. The audience was the entire citizen body.

Sutton Hoo helmet

Dug from a Suffolk garden in 1939, the Sutton Hoo helmet's iron face-mask — with its dragon-eyebrow crest — belonged to a king whose name no one can agree on.

Amelio Robles Ávila

Amelio Robles Ávila rode with Emiliano Zapata's forces through the Mexican Revolution, earning the rank of colonel through combat — then lived openly as a man for eight more decades, receiving veterans' recognition from the Mexican government in his nineties.

2008 Mumbai attacks

Ten men from Lashkar-e-Taiba landed by inflatable dinghy in Mumbai on November 26, 2008, killing 166 people across twelve sites over sixty hours. One attacker was captured alive and hanged four years later.

Operation Paperclip

After 1945, the U.S. Army recruited 1,600 Nazi scientists — including men who used concentration camp prisoners as test subjects — then falsified or destroyed their SS and war crime records to grant them visas.