in 2004, french police discovered a movie theatre in the paris catacombs, complete with a fully stocked bar and restaurant. they never found out who owned it.

the nazca lines in peru are gigantic (some as big as 900 feet across) geoglyphs - mostly images of birds - that were created by digging narrow furrows in the red rock, so that the lighter soil underneath shows through.

the big question: how did the ancient incans create the incredibly straight lines that are the hallmark of these images without being able to fly in a balloon - or a ufo - far above it?

simple: they stuck stakes in the ground, ran rope from stake to stake, and dug immediately under the ropes.

an australian research institute found that 80% of teaspoons disappear. the average period of time that a teaspoon took to disappear was 81 days. no one knows where they go.

(my wife believes that our old deck ate them.)

pilot amelia earhart and her navigator, fred noonan, disappeared while attempting to fly around the world. some of her skeletal remains were actually found on a south pacific island in 1940 (the rest were carried off and eaten by crabs), along with a pocket knife, part of her plane's windshield, a cosmetics jar, and her plane's navigational system. her plane crashed, and she apparently lived awhile before dying of injuries from the crash or hunger or thirst. no sign of her navigator was found.

still not sure why anyone considers her disappearance a mystery.

in france in 1772, an unusual baby was born, called tarrare. tarrare had an interesting affliction: he was hungry all the time, no matter how much he ate. eventually his parents threw him out because they couldn't feed him. he was terribly thin, had a mouth that stretched from ear to ear and blackened teeth, a high body temperature, and smelled terrible. his cheeks were wrinkled sacks that puffed out like a frog when he ate. before eating, the flesh of his belly was so loose that he could wrap it around himself like a belt, and it distended like a balloon when he ate enough to fill it - which was rarely.

for awhile, he made his way by performing, eating rocks and bushels of apples without chewing and even live cats and eels, drinking their blood and dropping them down his throat whole, plus offal from gutters, rats, and anything else he could find. he became a soldier, and ate so many rations that the army sent him to a hospital to find out what was wrong with him. to test his hunger, the doctors prepared food for 15 people. he ate it in one sitting, plus medical poultices, and sucked blood from people awaiting leeches. such was his hunger that they had to stop him from eating the dead in the morgue. he was finally thrown out when a 14-month-old baby went missing.

plot for a movie about a vampire or ghoul? an 'x files' script that never got made? no - a true story about a real man.

during tarrare's autopsy, they discovered that his stomach filled almost his entire torso, and that his gullet was as wide as his huge mouth. given the era, they were unable to tell whether it was illness or some mutation involving metabolism that caused his terrible hunger, but there were reports of one or two other people from his village that suffered the same affliction. as far as we know, it has not reappeared since.

25 scientists who worked for gec-marconi died between 1982-1988 under suspicious circumstances. a defense journalist who investigated the deaths hung himself in 1990 before publishing his findings. one scientist was found dead in his apartment with his feet tied, a plastic bag over his head, rope around his body and coiled 4 times around his neck. the death was ruled an 'accident'. the other deaths were under similar circumstances, including 1 who said he feared for his life, then 'fell' off a 40 story building soon after. another victim was found drowned in 18 inches of water. we still don't know what they were working on.

even today, no one knows what the great pyramid of giza is for. no one was buried in it, nothing was stored in it, and its bizarre internal structure seems to serve no purpose.

you know that scene at the end of the first indiana jones movie, where you see a crate that contains the ark of the covenant being moved into a huge warehouse with a countless number of other crates? turns out that such a place actually exists. it's owned by the army, and is in fort belvoir, virginia. in addition to weapons and artifacts from every u.s. war, it also contains 16,000 pieces of art that have never been seen by the public.