4 Times Huge Money Was Wasted To Prove Silly Theories

As shown in the documentary Behind The Curve, they used the gyroscope, ran their experiment, and conclusively showed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the Earth rotates on its axis and drifts 15 degrees every hour. Knodel and Campanella spent $20,000 on a high-end machine that proved exactly what every kindergartner in America already knows: The Earth is round. And they didn't even get a juice box as a reward.

You'll not be shocked to learn that Knodel did not accept his own findings. He continually concocted various ways to "fix" his own experiment, only to keep finding that pesky 15-degree shift every hour. It's almost as if the Earth isn't shaped like a Frisbee covered in a punch bowl at all.

In 1954, The Daily Mail plunked down a million euros in today's money to fund an effort to capture a yeti, complete with a cage and a handful of renowned scientists and explorers. They spent 15 weeks in the Himalayas looking for an ape man, and I'll give you three guesses as to what they found.

Of course, this was by no means the end of yeti-hunting, which has a long and stupid history that continues to this day. A supposed yeti scalp made it out of the Himalayas six years after the above expedition, when Edmund Hillary managed to coax one from Nepal thanks to a "donation" to the local monastery. It turned out to be part of a goat. Peter Byrne paid some monks a whopping $160 to take an alleged finger from a yeti hand in the Pangboche monastery. He then smuggled it out of Nepal with the help of Jimmy Stewart (yes, that Jimmy Stewart), who stowed the finger in his wife's underwear case. Oh, and it was actually a human finger. Of COURSE it was a human finger.

Related: 5 People Ironically Ruined By Their Very Stupid Beliefs

However, despite spending thousands of dollars on satellite photos and putting an expedition together, McGivern neglected to do one very important thing: get Turkey's permission to explore Mount Ararat. Only 150 miles away from the Iranian border, Mount Ararat was a crazy dangerous place. In 1991, Kurdish separatists kidnapped five Ark seekers on the mountain and held them for three weeks. So Turkey was hesitant to let starry-eyed church folk rampage over there.

So McGivern tried to Ron Swanson his way onto Mount Ararat, but Turkey wasn't having it. He needed a real permit to go up on the mountain, and he wasn't going to get it. Moreover, the guy McGivern had picked to lead the expedition, Ahmet Ali Arslan, had been accused of faking Ark photos before. The entire endeavor stank from the get-go, and McGivern pouted for a while, claiming he would stop searching for the biblical site that would put evolution in checkmate. He no longer had "Ark fever."

It didn't take him long to relapse. As of 2011, McGivern was still burning through the cash, surpassing the half-million-dollar mark on more satellite photos, ground-penetrating radar, and hiring other people to climb the mountain, only to get chased off by militants. He even tried to enlist President Obama's help to explore the site, and failing that, maybe to toss them some Presidential Medals of Freedom. Because why the hell not?

With that kind of scanning power, there would be no part of the loch unsearched. No place for Nessie, a giant prehistoric marine reptile, to hide. Tons of spectators showed up to watch, along with more than 250 newspapers and 20 different television stations. Bookies took bets on Nessie's discovery, and would have been on the hook for $1.65 million in 1987 cash when the monster was caught. It was such a possibility that a bookmaker at William Hill actually lowered the odds from 250-1 to 100-1 just to cut their losses if Shine's sonar scan busted Nessie in the middle of a backstroke.

Of course, the bookmakers' coffers were safe. Operation Deepscan turned up absolutely nothing. The biggest "hits" the flotilla got were probably from a seal or a handful of salmon. Nessie had escaped once again, using the fact that she didn't exist in the first place to do so.

In spite of tossing so much money down the drain, Shine was content with the scan's findings. He wanted to solve the mystery of Loch Ness, and he did, definitively. With no dinosaur, ancient whale, or monster serpent in the lake, he blames the continued sightings of Nessie on the "psychology of human perception," with people misidentifying waves and known animals. I would call it a happy ending if it didn't sound so much like the death of innocence and fantasy in a man's life.

For more, check out The Truth Behind Every Internet Conspiracy Theory:

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