Over 70 Ranker voters have come together to rank this list of Totally Real Things People Used To Think Were Fake
Voting Rules
Vote up the natural phenomena that are understandably hard to believe.
Belief is fluid. That's not a bastardized Bruce Lee quote, nor does it refer to a mythical river or rogue wave (which we'll get to later); it means that what people believe is in constant flux. The history of belief affirms that statement.
For centuries, ordinary people thought the sun revolved around Earth, disease was caused by demons, and a hole in the head could cure most ailments. Although it may seem like our ancestors were more gullible, they didn't buy many of the phenomena that we now accept as fact.
Note: many quotes are translated from their original languages.
Citrus As A Scurvy Cure Was So Reviled That It Produced A Slur: 'Limey'
Scurvy is thought to have killed millions of sailors during the Age of Discovery. After a while at sea, the men's bodies would slowly break down and inevitably expire. No one seemed to know why. Myriad treatments were tried, including exercise, fresh air, non-rotten meat, bloodletting, and "turf" from the ground. Citrus fruit was also used, but it wasn't scientifically proven until Royal Navy surgeon James Lind experimented on his crew and found the lemon and orange-eating group much healthier than the seawater, sulfuric acid, and vinegar-consuming groups.
Unfortunately, Lind's discovery was lost in the miasma of false and conflicting theories, many of which came from himself (he devoted only four pages of his 450-page study to citrus). Almost a half-century passed before British authorities took citrus seriously and issued fruit juice to sailors.
While other fleets rejected the citrus hypothesis, the Royal Navy thrived with its squeezed lemons and limes. Those citrus-believing Brits were called “Limeys,” a slur that survived the global acceptance of citrus as a scurvy treatment in the 20th century.
The Amazon's Boiling River Was An Incan Legend Covered Up By An Oil Company
Peruvian-American geoscientist Andrés Ruzo heard about an Amazon river so boiling hot that it startled the Spaniards during their Incan conquest. His sole source was his grandfather, as none of the mining companies, oil and gas companies, and geologists he contacted had heard of such a thing. So Ruzo took it as legend until he learned that his aunt and uncle had visited the superheated stream. Ignoring protests from his peers, who claimed that a boiling river couldn't exist without a nearby volcano, Ruzo went exploring in 2011.
In reality, Shanay-timpishka is heated by a geothermal gradient, which Ruzo described thusly:
Think of the boiling river as an Earth artery where you have that hot water running up… a fault, and heating up what starts off as a small, just ambient temperature, cold stream, right in the middle of the jungle. And as it runs over all these big fault zones, it supercharges it to turn it into ultimately almost four miles of thermal flow, much of that hot enough to kill you.
It has killed many beings, mostly small animals but also, according to Ruzo, a human that fell around 2014.
Further research confirmed that the river had startled conquerors, only it was in the 20th century not the 16th century and they weren't Spaniards but oil surveyors. Having found the river and assumed its cause to be a volcano, the surveyors feared it would scare away investors so they downplayed its existence. That worked for nearly a century.
Who wouldn't think that “zombie fire” is made up? What sounds like the title of a supernatural romance novel is a wildfire that appears to die during winter and come back to life during spring. In actuality, it smolders underground, surfacing when it's warm but retreating at the behest of snow and cold temperatures, a routine it can keep up for years without burning out. It does this by feasting on carbon-rich peat, which is abundant under northern boreal forests.
Although zombie fires (also called holdover or hibernating fires) have been recorded for many years, they remained mythical in Canada, where snow lasts for several months and easily extinguishes the notion that flames can survive underneath.
“All I know in Canada is that their existence has been reported more as a matter of folklore,” said Quebec forestry scientist Steven Cumming, who had himself heard stories he was unable to quantify. That changed when a zombie fire study was published in Nature in 2021. Cumming continued, “…what this paper does is give us some idea how often these things might be happening." They are likely to happen more often as the climate warms.
Van Leeuwenhoek Was Told That His Recently-Discovered Microorganisms Were Just Fairy Tales
Imagine trying to convince people in the 1600s that an ecosystem as magnificent and diverse as the one we occupy can fit in a drop of water. It's like Horton Hears a Who! Microbiology in the late 17th century can be summarized as Antonie Sees a What!
A non-scientist claiming the existence of invisible beings didn't immediately win over the scientific community. “After vainly trying to see some of the things which he sees,” physicist Christiaan Huygens wrote, “I much misdoubt me whether they be not illusions of his sight.” Throughout the 1670s, Van Leeuwenhoek was accused of telling "fairy-tales about the little animals."
He didn't help matters by refusing to disclose his methodology, including the type of lenses he crafted. However, scientists were eventually able to duplicate his findings, confirm the existence of what we now call microbes, and start the discipline of microbiology, of which Van Leeuwenhoek is the undisputed father.
The Proposed Cause Of Mad Cow Disease Maddened The Scientific Community
Scientific breakthroughs always engender skepticism; it's how science is supposed to work. But some discoveries are so incredible that they provoke not just doubt, but anger, scorn, ridicule, and shunning from the scientific community. That's what happened to prion discoverer Stanley B. Prusiner.
For decades, the cause of fatal kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease was unknown, with virologists theorizing that an undetected virus was responsible. Prusiner proposed a seemingly supernatural culprit: a protein that - unlike a virus, bacterium, fungus, and parasite - does not contain genetic material. In other words, his “prion" (an inexact portmanteau of “protein” and “infection") was a brand new disease-causing agent that did not behave like any other. It was like finding a flying elephant.
“Dumbo” was what scientists thought of Prusiner after he wrote his 1982 prion paper. Publication was delayed; presentations became screaming matches; researchers scrambled to find the virus they believed Prusiner had missed; “prion" was mocked and one scientist refused to collaborate unless Prusiner dropped the word.
“When there is a really new idea in science, most of the time it's wrong,” Prusiner said long after the controversy. “So for scientists to be skeptical is perfectly reasonable.” He had a problem, though, with personal attacks. The final straw was a 1986 Discover article that accused him of prioritizing fame over science. He stopped talking to journalists altogether.
The same year as the Discover article, mad cow disease was discovered in UK cattle. Prusiner's prions were to blame. Ten years later, the disease was confirmed in humans. The following year, Prusiner won the Nobel Prize.
Even his Nobel couldn't silence all critics, with some continuing to doubt the existence of infectious proteins.
Scientists Thought That The Platypus Was A Hoax Created By An Asian Taxidermist
Even now, centuries after its discovery, the platypus seems too weird to exist. So imagine the skepticism of Europeans upon receiving the first platypus specimens from Australia. Take this report for instance:
Of all the Mammalia yet known it seems the most extraordinary in its conformation; exhibiting the perfect resemblance of the beak of a Duck engrafted on the head of a quadruped. So accurate is the similitude, that, at first view, it naturally excites the idea of some deceptive preparation by artificial means: the very epidermis, proportion, serratures, manner of opening, and other particulars of the beak of a shoveler, or other broad-billed species of duck, presenting themselves to the view: nor is it without the most minute and rigid examination that we can persuade ourselves of its being the real beak or snout of a quadruped.
That comes from George Shaw in the first scientific description of the platypus, which was based on a skin sent by Captain John Hunter to Britain in 1798. Shaw's inkling that the animal could be a hoax was shared by many other scientists, especially since the specimens “reached England by vessels which had navigated the Indian seas,” as anatomist Robert Knox put it.
This is relevant because Asia was then known as a forgery factory, where “the artful Chinese had so frequently practised [their anatomical fakes] on European adventurers." Knox cited “mermaids,” the most famous of which was the Fiji mermaid, a half-monkey, half-fish construction that was passed off as real in the early 1800s. Many taxidermized “mermaids” originated in Japan.
But no stitches could be found on the platypuses, because there weren't any. The duck-billed, beaver-tailed, egg-laying, venom-producing mammals were certified real. We still can't believe it.
