Sheep wars

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…

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights , oil on oak panels, 205.5 cm × 384.9 cm (81 in × 152 in) , Museo del Prado , Madrid

Wyoming and Colorado cattlemen declared open war on sheep, dynamiting camps and herding thousands of animals off cliff edges. In one 1909 raid on Spring Creek, raiders killed three sheepherders and clubbed nearly 4,000 sheep to death.

Neutron star

Manhattan's mass compressed into two kilometers: a neutron star's surface gravity is 200 billion times Earth's, turning atoms into nuclear paste. What exactly is left when matter can't get any denser?

Sack of Rome (455)

Vandals spent two weeks stripping Rome in 455 CE — not burning it, but methodically prying gilded bronze roof tiles off the Temple of Jupiter and loading them onto ships. Even the empress's jewelry walked out the door.

Fabio Casartelli

Olympic champion Fabio Casartelli, 24, hit a concrete bollard at 88 km/h on the Col de Portet d'Aspet in 1995 — without a helmet. His teammates rode the next stage in silence, no one sprinting.

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.

Bahram Chobin

Bahram Chobin killed the Turkic khagan Shaba in single combat in 589, returned a hero — then, stripped of rank by a jealous emperor, raised a rebellion and took the Persian throne with no Arsacid drop of blood.

Hadrian

When his teenage lover Antinous drowned in the Nile in 130 AD, Hadrian declared him a god, built a city in his name, and flooded the empire with his portrait. The grief never stopped.

Harold Holt

Harold Holt, Prime Minister of Australia, waded into the surf at Cheviot Beach on December 17, 1967, and was never seen again. No body was ever recovered. Australia has no official cause of death on record.

The Garden of Earthly Delights

In Bosch's Hell panel, a man is crucified on the strings of a giant harp, arrows through both thighs. Painted around 1500, it hangs in the Prado — and no one is sure what any of it means.