Natural Phenomena We Still Can't Explain

You're sitting at home, getting your Netflix on, when you hear what sounds like a cannon being fired in your backyard. You go outside to see what the deal is, and there's definitely no Civil War reenactment going on. There's nothing you can see going on, in fact ... but the sounds continue. End of the world? Have the Four Horsemen upgraded from cavalry to an armored tank division? No one's sure.

They're called skyquakes, and they've been happening all over the world for a long time. Washington Irving even wrote about them, saying the sounds came from a ghostly game of bowling. As awesome as that sounds, it's unlikely. We have scientific explanations for it. The problem is we have so many scientific explanations that no one's sure which one's right.

Proposed explanations include tsunamis, methane eruptions, a meteor falling and exploding, and (in some particular areas) the shifting of sand dunes. It's also possible that skyquakes are caused by earthquakes, which is cool. Even cooler, though, is The Daily Mail's suggestion that they're signs of a giant government conspiracy involving super-secret, super-advanced spy planes. No one should believe that, because they're The Daily Mail ... but then again, maybe that's the perfect cover.

In 1991, scientists discovered a particle over the Utah skies. Why was this important? This is going to get a bit sciency, so buckle up.

Drop a bowling ball on your toe. (Not really. Just imagine it.) The bowling ball hurts, right? All that energy is spread through all the atoms in the bowling ball, and if you remember anything from science class, that's a huge number of atoms. The energy in the Oh-My-God particle is the equivalent to the energy in that bowling ball, but it's contained in a single particle. That's more energy than we've managed to give any particle, even with the Large Hadron Collider. The Oh-My-God particle also moves so fast that it broke what we all thought was the cosmic speed limit.

In theory, we should be able to see what's causing such a high-energy particle. But for now, scientists can only scratch their heads and build bigger and bigger ray detectors in an attempt to figure out what the heck threw that cosmic spitball at us.

Maybe you've previously read of the Taos hum. It's named for the town it's heard in — Taos, New Mexico— and it's been driving people nuts since the early 1990s. Just a fraction of the population hear the hum: about 2 percent.

But other hums pop up across the globe, and the 2 percent figure is pretty across-the-board. In 2011, the town of Woodland in England reported the presence of their hum, and they joined a list of towns that includes the English town of Bristol, the Scottish Largs, the Australian beachfront town of Bondi, and, of course, Taos. Most people who hear the hum (who are rather unimaginatively called "hearers") are between the ages of 50 and 70, and the noise has been linked to headaches, nosebleeds, and insomnia. At least one person was even reportedly driven to suicide because of the never-ending, maddening noise, which is something like the low throbbing of a diesel engine running constantly in the background of your mind.

One hum, heard in Kokomo, Indiana, was explained away as coming from a compressor and fan on a nearby industrial site. The others remain unexplained, though, and theories range from farm machinery to UFOs. The smart money, of course, is on the UFOs.

This one's pretty heartbreaking, so apologies in advance.

Mass whale strandings happen on coastlines around the world, and no one knows why. The largest we know about was in Argentina in 1946, when 835 false killer whales stranded themselves near Mar del Plata. The list of mass strandings is hugely long and incredibly depressing, so there's no way we're going to detail them all for you. Britain's Natural History Museum has been keeping track of them since 1913, and they've found some places where it happens more often: Cape Cod, the coast of New Zealand, and the west coast of Scotland. Those are the hotspots, but it happens all over.

One theory says that whales are using electromagnetic signals to navigate and are getting confused. Another says it's a sign that an earthquake's coming, but if they're trying to warn us, they should probably find another way to send a message. Yet another theory says human noise is confusing them and their ability to navigate — specifically, military's sonar interferes with the whales. However, we're pretty sure the military didn't have sonar 9 million years ago, which is how far back some strandings go, according to archaeological evidence.

Whichever theory you choose to believe, feel free not to look at any more of the pictures. They'll just make you sad.

Fortunately, not all of our naturally occurring mysteries involve sadness and potential death. Some are just weirdly cool, while still possibly being the work of aliens.

Scattered across a few locations in Pennsylvania are groups of rocks that ring like bells when hammered. Because it's rural Pennsylvania, and, let's face it, there's not a lot going on out there, there's even records of concerts held there as early as 1890 (likely the first ever rock concert).

Not until 1965 did scientists try to find out what was causing the phenomenon. They broke a bunch of rocks apart to see what was inside. Inside, they found ... rock. Aside from that, they did find that all the area rocks rang. Some just used too low a frequency for us to hear.

Researchers have recorded the phenomenon in a few other places across the world, including a rock field in Whitehall, Montana. History suggests that we've known about this for a long time, too, based on stories about ancient peoples playing rocks as musical instruments.

It gets weirder. Take one of the ringing rocks away from the other rocks (although, we know you'd never try to do that, because you're not that kind of person), and it stops ringing. Maybe it's sad you kidnapped it.