And to think it all began with a two-headed snake. A Spanish farmer captured one in 2002, and scientists were eager to study it. National Geographic Daily News published a story about the strange reptile on our website, and our readers went wild. More than a million people clicked on that weird tale, and then they came back for more and more stories.
Ten years and 8,000 stories later, more than 200 million individuals have clicked on our stories about strange and wonderful things. The two-headed snake was the first of many of the astounding National Geographic stories that lit up the Internet during the last decade. Our fans just can’t get enough of tales about albino Cyclops sharks, fish with hands, zombie ants with mind-controlling fungi, top-secret photographs of Area 51, and the truth behind the Maya “Doomsday” calendar.
As the founding editor of National Geographic News, I have watched our community of fans grow from hundreds to millions to hundreds of millions. It’s been a delight to publish stories that are as much fun to produce as they are to read. There isn’t a day that goes by when the editors of National Geographic News do not find stories about new species, amazing animal secrets, the wonders of deep space—all weird discoveries that change our thinking about who we are and where we came from, the great enigmas of the universe.
Did comets make life on Earth possible? Will superhuman hearing soon be possible? Can stars “eat” other stars? Where was the world’s oldest mattress found? These are only some of the hundreds of questions explored in our stories. The answers can be profound (and even disturbing), and they almost always lead to new questions.
National Geographic Tales of the Weird is our first reader filled with all kinds of these unbelievable true stories. National Geographic Books editor Amy Briggs and I have selected some of the highlights of the first ten years of National Geographic News—the stories that were most popular with the National Geographic global audience as well as some of our personal favorites. From “Creepy Crawlies” to “Human History,” each chapter is stuffed full of our strangest, oddest, and most truly fascinating stories.
As I picked each tale, I had to constantly remind myself that you can’t make this stuff up. We are living in the real age of discovery, and I have observed that the world is more marvelous and mysterious than anything we can imagine. All we’re doing is sharing this with millions of readers. It’s got to be one of the best jobs in the world.
—David Braun
Editor in Chief, National Geographic Daily News
news.nationalgeographic.com