These fascinating facts come to you from the project "Untold Hidden Things." The Facebook page, titled "Facts that will blow your mind," is the most popular, with over 4.9M followers. The following for the Instagram page is a bit more modest, with 137k curious minds.
But the creators have also branched out into YouTube, with the channel "Untold Hidden Things" presenting fascinating facts and interesting, lesser-known stories in video format. The scope of the topics is wide: from recent scientific breakthroughs to the legend of the 800-million-year-old mummy.
Steve Silverman, the man behind the "Useless Information" podcast, has been researching obscure and forgotten true stories for more than 30 years. Back when he got started, there was no Internet, so the research process was quite different. It required more ingenuity and time, naturally.
"In the early days, due to the lack of online newspaper archives, most of my research was confined to books," Steve tells Bored Panda. "The main problem that I found with using books was that the authors were simply reinterpreting what they read in previous books, which resulted in stories that weren't very well-researched," he notes.
As time went by, Steve's research methods evolved. Now he uses books only as a secondary source. Yet he still runs into some problems here and there. "Ideally, it would be great to interview the subject of each story, but since the bulk of the stories that I share with my audience occurred prior to 1950, that is nearly impossible to do," he shares.
"So, I mostly scour the newspaper archives to pull together the articles that were printed at the time that the story occurred."
Steven lets us into his rigorous process of finding new fascinating stories. "Of course, it all begins with finding stories that are both obscure and interesting," he says. "The main way that I do this is with search terms. I'll simply type a search term into one of the online newspaper databases and then see if I can find anything."
He gives us an example: "I may type in 'absurd story' or 'totally bizarre' and so on. Most of the time, I find little to nothing. Then there are days when I sit down and find several new stories in just a few hours." Steve has a spreadsheet to keep track of all the possible search terms to make the process easier. "I compare it to trying to find a needle in a haystack," he quips.
Some stories, of course, sound so unbelievable a person might even doubt that they're true. But Steven takes pride in his fact-checking abilities. "To verify these stories, I first research the stories as fully as possible. Then, I print everything out on paper, place the articles in date order, and read through the stories in the sequence in which they were originally covered in the press."
