In its 64 years of existence, NASA has tested some truly innovative and inspiring ideas. None, perhaps, were more radically weird than the wingless “flying bathtub,” towed by a hopped up Pontiac Catalina. It was a little remembered low-budget program in a time when NASA and the entire idea of space travel was radically different than what we see today- a time when pure engineering enthusiasm could make a bathtub fly.
There were 129 stage robberies in Arizona alone between 1875 and 1903. But one robbery in particular has left an enduring mystery. What exactly happened outside Wickenburg, Arizona on November 5, 1871?
A witness said, on August 8, 1975: it “sounded like the sky was collapsing and the earth was cracking.” What came next was the single most deadly infrastructure collapse in human history.
The unsung heroes of the naval war in the Western theater weren’t the city class casemate ironclads, but a much larger and more active fleet of more than seventy, much smaller, lightly armored vessels. The “Tinclads” of the US Civil War deserve to be remembered.