Collection
An authority’s silence, treated as evidence rather than as a gap.
Pennsylvania’s DEP chronology of the Centralia fire records only "May 1962 — Fire Commences" and assigns no cause: a document that lists the intervention and declines the origin. NASA’s catalogue calls an object space debris and never says which debris, so the identification everyone repeats belongs to someone else entirely. The Park Service explicitly does not close the question of the largest sailing stones. The NPS Atlas says discrepancies exist for all four origin hypotheses for Devils Tower and does not itemise them. In each case the missing sentence is not an oversight to be filled in by whoever is most confident — it is a deliberate limit, and reading it as one is the difference between citing a source and using it.
The fire is real and the town is gone. The two details everyone repeats — the trash fire, and the 250 years — are the two the record supports least.
A dark object drifting over the South Atlantic, shared for a quarter of a century as a 13,000-year-old alien satellite. NASA’s public catalogue says what it is, in a field of its own.
Heavy rocks leave long trails across a dry lakebed and nobody has ever seen them move. That was true for seventy years. It stopped being true on 20 December 2013.
Gypsum dissolves. The Tularosa Basin has no outlet for surface drainage, so runoff arrives carrying it, evaporates, and leaves crystals behind — and wind builds those into dunes up to 18 metres tall.
The rock is phonolite porphyry and the columns are cooling cracks — that much is agreed. How the magma got there is not. The NPS lists four origin hypotheses and says discrepancies remain for all of them.
