Tim Donaghy

Pyrocumulonimbus cloud formed by the firestorm following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima , 1945. Nuclear winter effects are triggered by at least a hundred such city firestorms.

01The paper coined the term 'nuclear winter'; Sagan published it simultaneously in Science and in Parade magazine, reaching 17 million readers at once.
02Soviet climatologist Vladimir Alexandrov independently produced near-identical temperature-drop models in Moscow the same year.
03The 35°C cooling estimate meant most temperate-zone crops would fail within weeks of a detonation, before fallout reached them.

01Lilly received early funding from the U.S. Navy and NIMH for dolphin communication research while designing his first isolation tanks.
02During his ketamine period, Lilly reported contact with entities he called ECCO — the 'Earth Coincidence Control Office' — in published accounts.
03He injected ketamine inside a floatation tank while the tank itself was submerged in a swimming pool, compounding the dissociation.

Anthony "Tino" De Angelis

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

NBA referee Tim Donaghy bet on games he personally officiated from 2005 to 2007, adjusting foul calls to swing point spreads. He pled guilty to two federal felony counts and served 15 months.

Pompey

Caesar's own son-in-law and political patron, Pompey was beheaded in a rowboat off Egypt by a former Roman officer named Septimius. His severed head was presented to Caesar, who reportedly wept.

Nuclear winter

Carl Sagan and four co-authors published calculations in 1983 showing that even a 'limited' nuclear exchange of 100 warheads could throw enough soot into the stratosphere to drop global temperatures by 35°C — killing more people than the bombs.

Jean-Bédel Bokassa

Bokassa spent $22 million — one-third of the Central African Empire's annual budget — on a coronation modeled on Napoleon's, including a throne cast as a two-ton golden eagle, while France quietly paid the bill.

Drexel Burnham Lambert

Drexel Burnham Lambert collapsed in February 1990, wiping out in days the firm that had financed the entire decade of hostile takeovers. It left a $650 million crater and 5,000 unemployed bankers before a single competitor blinked.

Sejanus

Sejanus ran the Roman Empire as Tiberius's viceroy for a decade — then a single letter from the emperor, read aloud in the Senate, ended it. The Roman crowd tore his body apart in the street before nightfall.

John C. Lilly

Lilly invented the isolation tank, mapped dolphin cognition for the government, and spent stretches of the 1970s submerged in ketamine for weeks at a time — still publishing, still funded, still presenting at conferences. The line between experiment and subject dissolved.

Salad oil scandal

Tino De Angelis filled vast New Jersey tanks mostly with seawater, floated a thin film of soybean oil on top for inspectors, and borrowed $175 million against it. The 1963 collapse took down two Wall Street firms in a single afternoon.

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.