Two Officials Were Thrown Out a Window in 1618 and It Started a War That Killed Eight Million People

 On May 23, 1618, a group of Protestant noblemen marched into the Bohemian Chancellery in Prague Castle and confronted two Catholic royal governors and their secretary.

After a brief and heated argument the Protestants picked up the three men and threw them out the window.

The window was approximately 70 feet above the ground.

All three men survived. They landed in a pile of manure and debris at the base of the castle wall. Catholics declared it a miracle and evidence of divine protection. Protestants suggested the men had simply been very lucky and landed softly.

What followed was not soft at all.

What the Window Led To

The Defenestration of Prague, which is the official historical term for throwing people out of windows and means exactly that, was the opening act of the Thirty Years War.

The Thirty Years War lasted from 1618 to 1648 and was one of the most destructive conflicts in European history. It started as a religious conflict between Protestant and Catholic states in the Holy Roman Empire. It grew into a continent-wide war involving most of the major European powers.

By the time it ended approximately eight million people were dead. Some regions of central Europe lost a third or more of their entire population. Entire towns were destroyed and abandoned. Famines caused by the disruption of agriculture killed as many people as the fighting itself.

The scale of destruction was so severe that some historians argue the Thirty Years War was as devastating to central Europe as the Black Death had been three centuries earlier.

And it began because some men threw three other men out a window.

The Survivors

All three men who went through that window lived long enough to tell their stories. Wilhelm von Slavata and Jaroslav Borzita von Martinitz, the two governors, and their secretary Philipp Fabricius survived the fall and eventually fled to Vienna.

Fabricius was reportedly given the nickname the one who was thrown out the window and later ennobled. His descendants reportedly incorporated the defenestration into their family coat of arms.

Why This Story Matters

The Defenestration of Prague is famous partly because it is so absurd. Men thrown out a window. War and catastrophe follow.

But it illustrates something real and important about how conflicts escalate. The window incident did not cause the Thirty Years War on its own. Decades of religious tension, political instability, and competing ambitions had been building pressure for years. The window incident was the spark that ignited something that was already primed to explode.

History is full of moments like that. Assassination, an incident at a checkpoint, a diplomatic insult that crosses a line. The specific event is often less important than the conditions that made the event a trigger.

Three men survived a seventy foot fall by landing in manure. Eight million people were not so lucky.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

A New York Newspaper Convinced Its Readers That Creatures Lived on the Moon and Nobody Caught On for Weeks

 In August of 1835 the New York Sun began publishing a series of articles about a remarkable scientific discovery.

A famous astronomer, they claimed, had developed a telescope of unprecedented power. Using this telescope he had observed the surface of the moon in extraordinary detail. What he found there was extraordinary.

Animals. Plants. Oceans and beaches. And most remarkable of all, intelligent creatures. Described as a species of bat-like humans with membranous wings who walked upright, lived in social groups, built structures, and appeared to have some form of civilization.

The articles ran over several days. They were detailed, written in the style of scientific reporting, attributed to a real astronomer named Sir John Herschel, and they convinced thousands of readers that life had been discovered on the moon.

None of it was true. Not a word of it.

How It Was Done

The articles were written by a journalist named Richard Adams Locke. He wrote them in the dry careful language of scientific reporting which made them sound credible. He used the name of a real and well-known astronomer, Sir John Herschel, who was actually in South Africa at the time conducting legitimate astronomical observations and had no idea his name was being used.

The Sun's circulation exploded. It became the most widely read newspaper in the world during the run of the articles. Other papers reprinted parts of them. Readers debated what the discovery meant for religion and science.

When the hoax was eventually exposed the Sun did not immediately retract the articles. The editor effectively shrugged and pointed out that the articles had been entertaining and had not technically claimed to be true. Readers who had believed them were embarrassed but many continued to buy the paper.

Sir John Herschel reportedly found the whole thing amusing when he eventually heard about it.

Why This Story Holds Up

The Great Moon Hoax of 1835 is one of the earliest documented examples of what we now call viral fake news. The mechanisms are identical to what happens today with misinformation on the internet.

A compelling story written in the style of legitimate reporting. A real name borrowed to add credibility. A topic that was exciting enough that people wanted to believe it. Rapid spread through the information networks of the time. And an audience that was not well equipped to verify extraordinary claims before accepting them.

The technology of 1835 was different. The psychology was identical.

People have always been susceptible to stories that are exciting and told with apparent authority. That is not a flaw unique to any era or any group of people. It is a feature of human cognition that anyone who wants to spread false information has always been able to exploit.

The people who read the Moon Hoax articles in 1835 were not uniquely gullible. They were human. And so are we.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

In 1908 Something Exploded Over Siberia With the Force of a Nuclear Bomb and We Still Are Not Completely Sure What It Was

 On the morning of June 30, 1908, something exploded over the Siberian wilderness near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River.

The explosion was heard hundreds of miles away. People were knocked off their feet by the shockwave more than 40 miles from the center. Windows shattered in towns even further away. A pressure wave circled the earth twice before dissipating. Scientists in Europe detected seismic activity from it.

The blast flattened approximately 800 square miles of forest. Eighty million trees fell. The pattern of the destruction, with trees knocked flat pointing away from the center in a radial pattern, indicated an airborne explosion rather than a ground impact.

By modern estimates the energy released was roughly equivalent to 1000 Hiroshima atomic bombs.

And there was no crater.

Why That Matters

When something hits the earth hard enough to flatten 800 square miles of forest it normally leaves a hole. The lack of a crater at Tunguska has been one of the most discussed aspects of the event for over a century.

The current scientific consensus is that the Tunguska event was caused by the airburst of a large asteroid or comet fragment, a space rock estimated at somewhere between 50 and 80 meters across that exploded in the atmosphere before it hit the ground. An airburst releases enormous energy over a wide area without creating an impact crater because there is no solid object that actually strikes the surface.

This explanation is widely accepted by scientists. But it took decades of research and debate to reach it.

When the first scientific expedition finally reached the Tunguska site in 1927 they found the devastated forest and the radial pattern of fallen trees but no crater and no large fragments of whatever had caused the explosion. The remoteness of the region in 1908 meant that no systematic investigation happened for nearly twenty years after the event.

The lack of clear physical evidence combined with the scale of the destruction fueled extraordinary speculation for generations. Theories included a comet made of ice that vaporized completely on impact. A microscopic black hole passing through the earth. An antimatter collision. And yes, an exploding alien spacecraft.

None of those theories have scientific support. The asteroid airburst explanation fits the physical evidence. But the Tunguska event remains the largest impact event in recorded human history and the absence of obvious physical evidence will keep it fascinating forever.

Why This Matters Beyond the Mystery

The Tunguska event matters for a reason that has nothing to do with mystery or speculation.

It happened. A rock from space exploded over Siberia with the force of a thousand nuclear weapons. If it had been traveling on a slightly different trajectory it could have exploded over a major city.

Scientists who study planetary defense, the effort to identify and potentially deflect asteroids that might threaten earth, use Tunguska as one of their baseline references. The 1908 event demonstrates that impacts capable of destroying a city or larger area are not just theoretical. They have happened within recorded human history.

The next Tunguska could happen anywhere. That is not alarmist speculation. It is what the historical record shows.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.