Bas Jan Ader
Bas Jan Ader was a melancholic artist who died trying to cross the Atlantic in a small boat.
Sadhu Haridas
Sadhu Haridas was a hatha yogi and fakir of nineteenth-century India, renowned for his reputed power to control his body completely using the power of his mind, employing the energies of kundalini. His most notable feat, carried out in 1837, was to survive burial underground, without food or water and with only a limited supply of oxygen, for forty days. This feat took place at the court of the Maharaja of the Punjab, Ranjit Singh, at Lahore, India (now in Pakistan).
CS Leigh
CS Leigh is a master of the vanishing act and reinvention. First, he dressed the stars at the Oscars, then he sold art to the rich, and then he worked as a movie director. Every time he disappeared and changed his name, leaving behind a trail of suspicion.
Dominion of Melchizedek
Dominion of Melchizedek is a micronation known for facilitating large scale banking fraud in many parts of the world.
Ken Jennings
In 2004, Jennings won 74 Jeopardy! games before he was defeated by challenger Nancy Zerg on his 75th appearance. His total earnings on Jeopardy! are $3,172,700.
Ada Blackjack
Ada Blackjack was an Iñupiat woman who lived for two years as a castaway on uninhabited Wrangel Island north of Siberia. She never asked for adventure, but it found her nonetheless. By 1921, the young Iñupiat woman found herself widowed with a young son. In order to earn money to care for him, she joined a dangerous expedition to a frozen island north of Siberia. After two tragic years, she was alone once more, trapped with ferocious bears amid a sea of ice.
Sidney Reilly
Sidney Reilly, famously known as the Ace of Spies, was a Jewish Russian- or Ukrainian-born adventurer and secret agent employed by Scotland Yard, the British Secret Service Bureau and later the Secret Intelligence Service. He is alleged to have spied for at least four nations. His notoriety during the 1920s was created in part by his friend, British diplomat and journalist Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, who sensationalized their thwarted operation to overthrow the Bolshevik government in 1918.
World Centre of Communication
The World Centre of Communication is a project conceived by the sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen and the architect Ernest Hébrard between 1901 and 1911. The project was presented in a volume published in 1913, titled Creation of a World Centre of Communication. The Centre has never been built: only urban projects, building drawings and a few sculptures do exist. What was the World Centre of Communication purpose? The authors aimed to gather in the Centre all the best intellectual product of mankind, both in the scientific and art field. In this ideal place, communication would have been at the service of the Good, Technological Progress and Civilisation. The Centre consisted of three areas: an Olympic Centre, an Art Centre and a Scientific Centre. The Olympic Centre would have contained a stadium, gyms, swimming pools, and at the entrance two giants statues of a man and a woman bearing a torch. The Art Centre would have housed a Temple of Art, galleries, libraries, schools, theatres, botanical gardens, and on both side two cathedrals. The Fountain of Life would have been located in the middle of the main square. The Scientific Centre, instead, would have been addressed to the Scientific Congress Building, the Temple of Religion and the Court of Justice. An imposing Tower of Progress completed the Centre with a huge transmitting antenna on its top and the Centre of World Press within, which had to broadcast the progresses of science.
The Palace of Soviets
The Palace of the Soviets is the most famous and grandiose of the unrealized projects of the Soviet government. Conceived in the early 1920s, it was supposed to become the main building and a symbol of the new country. The plan was that it would house government bodies, serve as a venue for sessions of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and mass demonstrations, and even have a swimming pool inside.