Disasters and accidents happen all the time. We live on a big planet and there are a lot of things going on all the time. There are plenty of ordinary accidents out there, but there are also what I like to call, mysterious accidents, accidents and events that don't seem to have any explanation, or that only seem strange or mysterious because they happened in a very strange way. Let me give you an example of what I am talking about. Two submarines were traveling under the waves. Both of them seemed to be traveling normally. Losing a submarine is not something that happens every day, but it is not what I would usually call a mysterious happening. This case was different, because one Israeli and one French submarine disappeared without a trace, both within 24 hours and both crews were unfortunately lost. At first, both Israeli and French authorities thought that maybe undersea disturbances had something to do with this, but the submarines were not anywhere near each other. The Israeli submarine had just been completely modernized and sold to Israel by Britain and the French submarine had only been out on a training mission. Both navies concluded that both boats suffered mechanical failures almost at the same time and plummeted to the ocean floor with all aboard. The odds against this happening are astronomical. Searches for both submarines turned up nothing.

A mysterious nuclear explosion took place in Kyshtym. The people in the area knew that something had happened, but it had been hushed up by the Soviet Government. A Soviet dissident disclosed the info, that there had been an explosion 20 years before, but the intelligence agencies in this country didn't give much credence to his report, because many thought that he was just a malcontent. The explosion occurred on 29 September, 1957. It was found out many years later that it was caused by nitrate and acetate salts in a waste tank. The tank contained very radioactive waste. The cooling system for the tank failed and caused the explosion. The contaminated area became known as the Kyshtym Footprint. While this explosion remained mysterious for many years, we now know exactly what caused it.

A book was written about one of the most controversial accidents that ever occurred on a mountain. It seems that twelve men decided to climb Mt. McKinley in July, 1987. Seven of the twelve died on the mountain. No rescue attempts were ever made. That is the strange part of this. Ten days went by, why weren't there any attempts to save this people, no one seems to know? A storm had hit at 20,000 feet and days just drifted by without help, as people just died. Even after all this, the bodies were never recovered. No investigations were ever conducted into the incident.

Not all strange accidents are mysterious, they are just strange. A van was driving along in one of the jungle countries. Apparently there was something about this van that angered the local elephants, at least one of them. The elephant came running out and hit the van in the side turning it upside down. The elephant seemed satisfied with what it had done and just walked away, to the relief of the occupants who were not hurt. Sometimes you have to wonder what gets into the minds of these animals. Maybe the elephant thought that the van was another large animal and was infringing on it's territory?

One accident that I find hard to comprehend happened to a jogger. I would think that when people are jogging they would be looking where they are going. This accident is not funny, but it certainly is one of the stranger ones. After hearing about it you might think that it wasn't an accident at all and somebody did this poor guy in? Here is what happened, a jogger was jogging along and supposedly jogged off of a 200 foot cliff. You just have to wonder how he didn't spot the fact that the cliff was coming up?

No weird and strange accidents or events can be talked about without mentioning spontaneous human combustion. There have been quite a few of these cases on record. To refresh your recollection, this is when it is suspected that someone has combusted into a hot, fiery mass without the aid of any device that could set them on fire. The flames are so hot that bone is burned and many times there is nothing left except for a pair of feet. To make matters even more mysterious, usually the furniture they are sitting on never burns, even if it is flammable. This is precisely what happened to a London man in 2005. When the fire department got to him, there was nothing left but a heap of ash and a set of legs and yet the furniture he was sitting on was not even marked. Many people state that they don't believe in spontaneous human combustion, but yet they have no explanation for the complete burning of the body's, which would take extremely high temperatures and the unburned furniture

One of the most unusual accident that I saw was a vehicle, a car, that hit a house. There is nothing unusual about cars hitting houses, but this was a little different. The house was near a parkway and a car must have jumped the road at thigh speeds since when it hit the house, it blew out part of the first floor, but in such a way that it had become the support for the second floor. It looked very strange indeed.

Right after World War II, a flight of torpedo bombers left from Florida on a training mission. This was one of the strangest flights in history. It headed out to an area in the famous Bermuda Triangle, where it was supposed to conduct the exercise and then turn around and come back. The flight consisted of 14 people, none of whom ever returned. Even to this day, no one is absolutely sure what ever happened to them, but there are a lot of theories. One theory states that something in the triangle got a hold of them and either sucked them under or abducted them. Most theories state that the compass in each aircraft was effected by something and the flight got lost and traveled in the wrong direction until they all ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean.