A World of Secrets: 2 (The Firewall Trilogy, 2)

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Before his ignominious death, Kidd captured and plundered many ships. But the one of that got him in hot water was the Quedagh Merchant, a Moorish trading ship laden with gold, silver, silks, satins and other treasures from India. Kidd claimed it was a legitimate target, given it was controlled by the French. But it had an English captain and Indian merchandise, and the Moghul emperor at the time threatened to close off trade routes for the East India Company in response, Reuters reported. It’s not how much you hide a secret that’s harmful, but how often you find yourself thinking about it,” Slepian says. For decades, secrecy research focused on the effects of concealment. But I couldn’t find any studies that systematically looked at what secrets people keep, how they keep them or how they experience secrets on a day-to-day basis,” he says. “So, we started at the beginning, with the most basic questions we could ask.” Secrecy basics

An Egyptian port city on the Mediterranean Sea, Thonis-Heracleion served as a major trading hub prior to the founding of nearby Alexandria around 331 B.C. Mythical hero Heracles and Helen of Troy both supposedly spent time there. Around the second century B.C., however, the city center collapsed due to soil liquification, possibly triggered by earthquakes, tsunamis, or floods. Eventually, all of Thonis-Heracleion sank underwater, where it remained lost to time until being rediscovered in the early 2000s by marine archeologists. Since then, large statues, animal sarcophagi, temple ruins, pottery shards, jewelry, coins, and even 2,400-year-old fruit baskets have been pulled from the waves, thus shining new light on this real-life Atlantis. 2. Plain of Jars Thousands of lichen-covered stone jars from the Iron Age, some standing close to 10 feet tall and weighing several tons, dot the mountainous landscape of northern Laos. Carved largely from sandstone and found in groups ranging from just one to 400, legend holds that giants used them as wine glasses. Many archeologists, on the other hand, believe they served as funerary urns, though much remains unknown about their purpose, about how they were moved into place, and about the civilization that produced them. Recent research dates at least some of the stone jars to as early as 1240 B.C., which would make them far older than the human remains buried nearby. Complicating matters is that many of the jars stand in fields of unexploded munitions, the vestige of a massive U.S. bombing campaign during the Vietnam War, and therefore cannot be safely studied. 3. Guanabara Bay Ancient writers claim that Cleopatra VII and her lover, Mark Antony, were buried together in a tomb after their deaths in 30 B.C. The writer Plutarch (A.D. 45 to 120) wrote that the tomb was located near a temple of Isis, an ancient Egyptian goddess, and was a "lofty and beautiful" monument containing treasures made of gold, silver, emeralds, pearls, ebony and ivory. In Berlin’s experience, professional archeologists tend to eschew the role of popular sleuth, especially as it pertains to things like Noah’s Ark and treasure-laden tombs. Nevertheless, she recognizes the sense of wonder such mysteries inspire. During his trial, Kidd wrote a letter claiming he pilfered around 100,000 British pounds and buried it somewhere, offering to trade the location for his life, according to Reuters. However, during the trial it was estimated that the takings from all his time aboard the Adventure Galley likely totaled closer to 400,000 pounds. To his dying breath, Kidd argued he was a legitimate privateer who had only ever plundered targets approved by the crown. But he was hung and his body covered with pitch and squeezed in an iron cage displayed over the Thames.It’s hard for people to get those secrets off their minds. The same paper showed that people’s minds wander to their secrets far more often than they actively try to conceal their secrets from others. And although the frequency of concealment didn’t seem to have much effect on well-being, the more people’s minds wandered to their secrets, the worse off they were.

Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa went missing in 1975. The FBI is once again on the hunt for his body in a former New jersey landfill. (Image credit: Getty Images) The Georgia Guidestones, sometimes referred to as the "American Stonehenge," is a granite monument erected in Elbert County, Georgia, in 1979. The stones are engraved in eight languages — English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese and Russian — each relaying 10 "new" commandments for "an Age of Reason." The stones also line up with certain astronomical features. Here is strip 11 of the Copper Scroll, which describes a vast hoard of hidden gold and silver that likely is imaginary. (Image credit: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC By 4.0) Secrets are a universal human phenomenon. Almost everyone has something to hide (though, of course, not all secrets are of the deep, dark variety). Yet until recently, psychological scientists hadn’t spent much time exploring how keeping secrets affects us. Slepian got his start studying secrets indirectly. He had been researching metaphor—looking at the ways people use language about physical experiences to describe abstract concepts—and he became intrigued by the metaphor of being “weighed down” by a secret. “I wondered if it was just a linguistic thing that people do, or if it reflected something deeper,” he says.We all keep the same kinds of secrets,” Slepian says. “About 97% of people have a secret in at least one of those categories, and the average person is currently keeping secrets in 13 of those categories.” The story of King Arthur has been told and retold numerous times over more than 1,000 years. Camelot, the knights of the round table, the wizard Merlin and the sword Excalibur are all famous parts of the Arthurian tales. People are fascinated by origins, people are fascinated by mysteries,” says Andrea M. Berlin, a professor of archeology at Boston University. “We’re very curious about what we can’t see, about what came before.” One summer night in 1977, Jerry Ehman, a volunteer for SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, may have become the first man ever to receive an intentional message from an alien world. Ehman was scanning radio waves from deep space, hoping to randomly come across a signal that bore the hallmarks of one that might be sent by intelligent aliens, when he saw his measurements spike.

Some of his ongoing research, for example, is exploring the effects of having to keep secrets on behalf of an employer. Early results suggest that work secrets, like personal secrets, can be both good and bad. On the one hand, it can feel good to be entrusted with important information about one’s company. On the other, keeping that secret can feel like a burden.The only clue to their potential whereabouts? The mysterious word CROATOAN carved on a palisdae, and another CRO carved on a tree. White assumed the residents had traveled to Croatoan Island, which is now called Hatteras Island. But a storm blew in and prevented White from reaching the island, and he never raised enough money for another search. This 75 -hectare of fine greenery is known to be one of the world’s greatest botanical gardens. Visitors often visit this botanical garden with some thirty thematic gardens and 10 exhibition greenhouses. This place is surely for all the nature lovers who enjoys a day to be one with nature. Ancient writers describe a fantastic series of gardens constructed at the ancient city of Babylon in modern-day Iraq. It's not clear when these gardens were built, but some ancient writers were so impressed by the gardens that they called them a "wonder of the world." Around 250 B.C., Philo of Byzantium wrote that the Hanging Gardens had "plants cultivated at a height above ground level, and the roots of the trees are embedded in an upper terrace rather than in the earth." Having a secret can feel exhausting. In fact, it is exhausting. With Nir Halevy, PhD, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Adam Galinsky, PhD, also at Columbia Business School, Slepian performed a series of experiments asking participants to recall either personal information they intended to keep secret or personal information they hadn’t shared but would be willing to discuss if it came up in conversation. The researchers found that people felt both more fatigued and more alone when they recalled their secrets than when they recalled the undisclosed information. One explanation, Slepian says, is that thinking about a secret can create a motivational conflict in which a person’s need to connect with others directly clashes with their desire to keep their secret to themselves ( Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 45, No. 7, 2019). “We want to confide and get the secret off our chests, but we also want to protect ourselves and our relationships. That conflict is what wears us down,” he says.