Dancing Plague, Duelling Magicians and Possible Trees Mistaken for Earhart's Plane

THE INTERNET — The Daily Grail, in its news briefs for October 21, 2026, offers readers a broad sweep of the curious, beginning with the vexed matter of Havana Syndrome. The site's authors say they have recorded a video chat for its Patreon page examining what they regard as the most likely explanations.

In archaeology, the roundup notes that Malta's mysterious stone 'railways' were long thought to be prehistoric, but that new evidence suggests a different story. Elsewhere, researchers are reported to say that possible wreckage of Amelia Earhart's plane is likely to be nothing more than trees.

Matters of life and death receive attention too. A doctor who interviewed 1,500 people before they died is said to report what nearly 90 percent of them experience beforehand. A separate item looks back at the dancing plague of 1518, when hundreds of people were reportedly seized by an uncontrollable urge to dance.

The occult is represented by an account of the Battle of Blythe Road, the magical duel said to have taken place in 1900 between W. B. Yeats and Aleister Crowley, along with a link to Yeats's Golden Dawn tools and private journals.

The future is not neglected. One piece profiles the chief executive of Pioneer Labs, a biotech startup developing Mars-adapted microbes in the hope of making alien worlds habitable. Another reports that scientists built a computer from living human brain cells, which can now decode Braille.

The remaining items include a personal account of a Bigfoot encounter at Bradshaw Ranch, and a Wall Street Journal report that Elon Musk ordered the throttling of Starlink technology important to Ukrainian defence. The briefs close with an essay on how intuitions work, and a quotation from Henri Bergson on intuition as a way of feeling one's way into the heart of a thing.