Satan is often shown in popular depictions with horns on its head, furry legs and cloven hooves of a goat. But just why is the devil depicted with horns and hooves? It turns out that historians don’t agree on when this depiction of the devil became popular and where it...

Crop circles are a very straightforward phenomenon: They are a type of landscape art made by humans. Despite evidence to the contrary, some people remain convinced that crop circles were made by aliens brought by UFOs. But how did unidentified flying objects come to be linked with flattened expanses of...

Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, is a giant ape-like creature that some people believe roams North America. It is a cryptid (or species rumored to exist) and just like the Chupacabra or Loch Ness monster, there's scant physical evidence to suggest Bigfoot is actually out there. But that doesn't stop alleged sightings...

Worldwide, more than four in 10 people believe in witchcraft, a new survey suggests. However, witchcraft, or the concept that people can use supernatural abilities to cause harm is a belief that varies dramatically between nations. Just 9% of people in Sweden believe in witchcraft, while more than 90% of...

Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, is one of North America's most enduring legends. The scientific community largely dismisses the idea of a large, unknown ape-like creature sauntering through the forests because there's never been any hard evidence that such an animal exists. Nonetheless, there have been thousands of reported eyewitness accounts over...

Of all the conspiracy theories that litter the Internet, the flat Earth conspiracy is quite possibly the most curious. After all, the ancient Greeks figured out the planet's shape (and even its circumference) in the third century B.C. But a fringe society founded in the 1950s, dedicated to insisting that...

The spring equinox is upon us. On Monday (March 20), the sun will shine directly on the Earth's equator, spring will officially begin in the northern hemisphere, and the length of day and night will be nearly equal across the globe ... or, across the disk, if you're a flat-Earther....

Conspiracy. Just saying the word in conversation can make people politely edge away, looking for someone who won't corner them with wild theories about how Elvis, John F. Kennedy and Bigfoot are cryogenically frozen in an underground bunker. Conspiracies are sometimes real. The Watergate break-in is a good example of...

Hundreds of monster hunters will descend on Loch Ness this weekend for what organizers claim is the biggest Nessie search in more than 50 years — but don't expect a monster discovery. The Loch Ness Centre, a visitor attraction in Scotland, announced earlier this month that it was looking for...

If you believe in ghosts, you're not alone. Cultures all around the world believe in spirits that survive death to live in another realm. In fact, ghosts are among the most widely believed of paranormal phenomenon: Millions of people are interested in ghosts. It's more than mere entertainment; A 2019...

A mysterious, malevolent-looking mermaid mummy that was brought back to the U.S. from Japan more than 100 years ago appears to be a mix of fish, monkey and lizard parts that have been joined together like Frankenstein's monster, initial scans suggest. The haunting mummy, which is around 11.5 inches (29...

A search for the Yeti ended last month with a single strand of horse hair, a BBC Radio 4 program covering the Himalayan hunt has revealed. Andrew Benfield, a writer and meditation teacher, has spent years looking for the Yeti with his skeptical friend and political analyst Richard Horsey. The...

A dramatically choreographed performance that veered from gracefully spinning aerialists to gyrating, hoop-wielding dancers wearing glow-in-the-dark costumes, twirled its way to first place in the annual Dance Your Ph.D. Contest. The video, titled Representations of the Braid Groups, describes mathematics principles about braid behavior that might leave non-mathematicians scratching their...

There's a secret hidden in a Vincent van Gogh painting. It remained undetected for 128 years, until Mary Schafer, a paintings conservator at Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Missouri, discovered it with the aid of a surgical microscope — imbedded in the paint in the foreground of van Gogh's 1889...

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. When he published The Sun Also Rises in 1926, Ernest Hemingway was well-known among the expatriate literati of Paris and to cosmopolitan literary circles in New York and Chicago....