The Vatican City, which is actually a sovereign state, came into existence in 1929 with the signing of the Lateran Treaty. Since then, the city has been a huge tourist draw bringing millions of visitors every year. However, many of those visitors are not aware of some very surprising facts surrounding the city, from the Vatican's involvement in Watergate to its stance on extraterrestrial life.

On a warm January day in Boston, a giant brown wave raced through the streets destroying everything in its path. A 2,300,000-gallon gallon tank of molasses at the Purity Distilling Company's facility had unexpectedly burst killing 21 people and injuring 150 more. The tank exploded with such force that the rivets holding the panels shot out like machine gunfire and buildings were flattened. To this day residents of the community still claim to be able to smell molasses on warm days.

Grace Fryer, a worker for US Radium Corporation, and her co-workers didn't understand the dangers of the radium paint they worked with everyday, and if anything, enjoyed its peculiarities. The all female painting department at US Radium played around with this radium paint, known as Undark. The girls painted their nails, and even their teeth, and enjoyed the reactions of their friends when the lights went out.

Centralia, a small borough in Pennsylvania was once a prosperous mining community. It wasn't until an innocent plan to clean up a landfill resulted in the town becoming synonymous with American ghost towns. The practice of reducing the amount of garbage in the local landfill by means of controlled fire was nothing new. The city council hired a group of volunteer firefighters to manage the burn every year, and had no prior problems.

In the late nineteenth century, society had a heightened interested in animal intelligence spurred on by Charles Darwin's then recent writings. A German man by the name of William Von Osten took particular interest. Von Osten subscribed to the school of thought that the human race greatly underestimated the inherent intelligence of animals. To test his hypothesis, Von Osten conducted experiments on a bear, several cats, and finally a horse.