Future Timeline

(Counterpunch) Mayak was constructed in 1946 and helped procure the Soviets’ first atomic bomb in 1949 under the leadership of Joseph Stalin. Like virtually all of Russia’s nuclear projects during the Soviet era, and just like the United States’s Manhattan Project, Mayak was built and operated in total secret and with outright disregard for local communities and ecology…

(A)t Mayak …the site had instituted a cooling system early on that continually kept its hot nuclear waste from reaching a critical point. But (on September 29,1957) the waste in a holding cistern buried twenty feet underground began to heat up fast. The system had failed, but nobody knew what was happening until it was far too late. As the radioactive slop reached 350 degrees Celsius, its 160-ton concrete lid began to tremble, and finally blew. The cistern and the eighty tons of boiling gunk inside exploded in a volcanic eruption filled with radioactive steam and soot a half-mile into the air. The black cloud darkened the sky, spreading twenty million curies of blistering atomic particles across 52,000 square kilometers, roughly the size of West Virginia, and contaminating the homes of an estimated 270,000 people. Later, the accident at Mayak became known as the Kyshtym disaster, after the name of the closest town to the blast. In the immediate aftermath, the first wave of forced evacuation, encompassing nearly 10,000 people, was initiated, but it took upwards of two years for other evacuations to be carried out in nearby towns that had also been exposed to the radioactive fallout.

The horrific blast was measured as a Level 6 disaster on the International Nuclear Event Scale, which places the Kyshtym disaster behind Chernobyl and Fukushima (both Level 7s) as the third-most significant nuclear disaster ever. It is certainly the least well-known. At the time, just as the United States government kept the inner workings of their own nuclear program shrouded in secrecy, the Soviet government kept Mayak under wraps. Mayak, according to many Soviet maps, did not even exist.

It wasn’t until 1976, when dissident scientist Zhores A. Medvedev wrote an article for the British journal The New Scientist, that the Western world was made aware of what happened.

(IFL Science) Arguably some of the most iconic archaeological artifacts ever to come out of Mesoamerica, the famous Aztec crystal skulls have inspired countless blockhead theories about alien sculptors, psychic technologies, and magic stones. In reality, however, the supposed pre-Columbian relics might just be cheap knock-offs sold by a nineteenth-century French conman.

The Story Of The Crystal Skulls

It’s thought that there are around a dozen of the skulls in museums and private collections around the world, ranging from a couple of inches in height to roughly the size of a bowling ball. The shiny noggins made their debut in 1856, when the British Museum purchased a miniature skull that was said to have been crafted by Aztec hands, although it’s unclear exactly where the piece came from.

The British Museum then purchased a second crystal skull from Tiffany & Co. in 1897, and it’s this piece that can be seen on display today. Despite initially believing the skull to be pre-Columbian, the museum says that "attempts to verify this on technological grounds have not proved successful," and that the item's origins are "most uncertain."

Other crystal skulls of varying sizes soon appeared in the collections of Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology and the Smithsonian Institute. It wasn’t until the 1950s, however, that a Smithsonian minerologist named William Foshag identified the latter as a fake after noticing that the piece had clearly been created using modern jewelry-making tools.

A few more skulls popped up at antique auctions in the twentieth century, including one that was sold to an English deep-sea fisherman in 1943. Known as the Skull of Doom, the artefact is rumored to emit blue lights from its eyes and cause computers to crash, but has clearly been made using modern technology and is quite clearly a fake.