Chevalière d'Éon

Front page cover of the newspaper L'Aurore for Thursday 13 January 1898, with the letter J'Accuse...! , written by Émile Zola about the Dreyfus affair . The headline reads I Accuse...! Letter to the President of the Republic .

The Wow! signal represented as "6EQUJ5". The original printout with Ehman's handwritten exclamation is preserved by Ohio History Connection .

Chevalière d'Éon

The Chevalier d'Éon served Louis XV as a spy, a soldier, and a diplomat — then lived thirty-three years as a woman after a royal decree settled a wager about her birth sex, dying in London in 1810 with the question still unresolved.

Tarrare

Tarrare, an 18th-century French soldier, ate live cats, eels, and a silver fork whole — and was suspected of swallowing a toddler from a hospital ward. Hunger never left him.

Peregrine falcon

At 240 mph, the peregrine falcon folds into a teardrop and becomes the fastest thing alive — its specially baffled nostrils managing airflow a jet engineer would envy. No animal on Earth has ever been clocked faster.

J'Accuse...!

Zola's open letter, published across the front page of L'Aurore on 13 January 1898, named eleven army and government officials by name. The editor printed 300,000 copies; Paris sold out before noon.

Billy Tipton

Billy Tipton toured American jazz circuits for decades, married three times, and adopted three sons — his birth sex unknown to his family until paramedics arrived at his death in 1989, and the secret he kept became the subject of a biography.

Battle of Manzikert

Sultan Alp Arslan used the captured Byzantine Emperor Romanos IV as a literal footstool, then released him for ransom. The humiliation triggered a civil war that handed Anatolia to the Turks within a decade.

Lupercalia

Priests called Luperci slaughtered goats, cut strips from the hides, smeared sacrificial blood on two boys' faces, then ran naked through Rome striking every woman they passed. February. Every year.

Peter Arnett

Peter Arnett broadcast live from Baghdad's Al-Rashid Hotel as US cruise missiles detonated outside his window — the first real-time war broadcast in history. The Pentagon called it treason; his ratings were enormous.

Wow! signal

On August 15, 1977, astronomer Jerry Ehman circled a 72-second spike on a printout and wrote 'Wow!' beside it. It broadcast on the 1420 MHz hydrogen line. It has never come back.