1

X-Men (2000)

Remember the scene when Magneto and Professor X play a tense, symbolic game of chess? Well, the actors certainly do. Here’s why: Neither Patrick Stewart nor Ian McKellen knew how to play chess before filming.

So, director Bryan Singer brought in a Canadian chess Grandmaster to help design the game the two men would share by choreographing each piece's movement based on the high-strung dialogue they were having —Professor X needed to win.

2

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

Did you know that E.T., the beloved extraterrestrial who wanted to phone home, was intentionally designed to have no specified gender ?

Director Steven Spielberg expressed that his intention was to define E.T. as a "plant-like" creature, neither male nor female, and that this was explicitly explained in earlier versions of the script.

However, in the film, young Elliott insists that he knows the gender of his newfound friend: "He’s a boy," he explains to his sister when she asks. The audience went along with Elliott’s interpretation, and hence E.T. is considered to be male.

3

How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)

Jim Carrey loathed the process of becoming The Grinch. Though the Dr. Seuss character was fun to play, sitting for hours and hours for makeup and costume until the green look was perfected, he said, was exhausting.

So, he was shocked one day when he arrived on set, only to find yet another Grinch ready there before him. It was none other than director Ron Howard, who had been up since 3:30 am, getting into full costume in solidarity with him.

4

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

Watching Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, one might take for granted that the stop-motion marvel took years of painstaking effort. Around 227 puppets were built for the production because each character had multiple duplicates to allow shooting on many sets simultaneously.

The protagonist Jack Skellington alone needed nearly 400 different heads to capture enough facial expressions.

5

Toy Story (1995)

Even though we all recognize Woody the Cowboy, there was a time when the leading character of Toy Story was going to be… quite different.

Sheriff Woody was at first conceived as a ventriloquist dummy . But the Pixar creators thought that a softer cowboy toy would be a little bit friendlier. What do you think?

6

Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)

We all know the loyal little robot of the Star Wars world. But R2-D2’s name came about unintentionally. While filming a previous film, George Lucas had liked an abbreviation he heard his sound editor shout one day: "R2, D2".

It referred to "Reel 2, Dialogue Track 2" . But the expression sparked Lucas’s imagination.

7

Home Alone (1990)

Yes, Kevin is nine years old in the movie. But most of his "dangerous" moments were handled by a 30-year-old stuntman in kid-sized clothes!

Still, some injuries were inevitable. And they didn’t come from hanging from a zipline or sliding downstairs: No, young Macauley Culkin got a scar from Joe Pesci accidentally biting his fingers too hard in one scene.

8

Interstellar (2014)

Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is well known for its ambitious science fiction vision. But Nolan went above and beyond with details. For example, the robot TARS wasn’t a CGI creation: it was physically built (a kind of "puppet-robot").

Plus, the space suits the actors wore were designed with functioning oxygen units and cooling tubes! Needless to say, though, all scenes were filmed on Earth.

9

The Matrix (1999)

Did you know that Johnny Depp was the first choice to play Neo for The Matrix ? As an up-and-coming actor in the 90s, the writers had considered him perfect for the role. However, fate decided Keanu Reeves would take the part, and the rest was history.

Reeves didn’t have it easy, though: the Wachowskis had him read philosophical books like Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, Out of Control by Kevin Kelly, and Introducing Evolutionary Psychology by Dylan Evans.

10

Scarface (1983)

After Martin Scorsese saw Brian De Palma’s Scarface, he reportedly told actor Steven Bauer: "It’s great… but they’re going to hate it ."

He wasn’t wrong. Critics did hate it, at first. They called it vulgar, excessive, hysterical, and violent. Scorsese himself had been criticized for the violence in his own work, so he recognized the pattern instantly. However, as we know, audiences eventually made it a cult classic.

1

There's an unexplained billion-year gap

Look closely at the canyon walls, and you'll notice something strange: a clean, sharp line where ancient rock simply stops, and a much younger layer begins directly above it.

This geological puzzle is called the "Great Unconformity," and it represents over a billion years of rock layers that are simply absent , as though that stretch of time never happened. In some spots, rock dated 1.8 billion years old sits directly beneath rock that is only 520 million years old. Where did the missing billion years go?

The leading theory involves the violent breakup of an ancient supercontinent, but scientists are still piecing it together.

2

During the Cold War, it hid a nuclear fallout shelter

During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the U.S. government converted part of the Grand Canyon Caverns into a fallout shelter. This dry cave system, more than 200 feet underground, was stocked with enough food and water to sustain 2,000 people. Naturally, it was never occupied, and the supplies were never used.

The caverns have since been transformed into a tourist attraction, with organized tours winding through the same underground chambers that were once intended as a refuge from nuclear war. You can even book a night's stay there.

3

The Federal Aviation Administration was founded after a crash over the canyon

In 1956, two commercial passenger planes collided in midair over the eastern Grand Canyon, killing all 128 people on board both crafts. Rescue teams struggled to reach the wreckage deep inside the canyon, and the extreme heat of the crash had caused the planes' aluminum to fuse with the bedrock. There were no survivors.

The disaster exposed a terrifying truth: the U.S. air traffic control system was dangerously outdated, relying on pilots' visual estimates and rough guesswork from controllers , with no way to separate fast-moving aircraft from slow ones, or instrument-flying planes from those navigating by sight. Congress responded by passing legislation that created both the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the National Transportation Safety Board.

4

A hoax suggested that an Egyptian civilization had lived there

In 1909, the Arizona Gazette reported that an explorer named G. E. Kinkaid had discovered a vast underground citadel inside the canyon, filled with artifacts linked to ancient Egyptian civilization. He even claimed the expedition had been funded by the Smithsonian.

This story described hieroglyphics on the walls, mummies in the chambers, and relics pointing to a direct connection with the Egypt of the pharaohs. It was incredibly detailed, and it was, of course, a hoax. No evidence for any of Kinkaid's claims ever surfaced.

5

Fewer than 100 people have ever hiked its full length

Among the few people who have completed the through-hike of the Grand Canyon is Jen Hogan, the first woman to accomplish it, finishing her journey in 2021–2022.

It’s a full 800-mile length below the rim. The route involves extreme heat, flash floods, near-impassable areas, and stretches with no water or trail whatsoever. Around 60 or 70 people have reportedly accomplished it. This makes it one of the most exclusive feats on Earth.

6

The Grand Canyon's rocks predate dinosaurs entirely

Visitors scanning the canyon walls for fossils are often surprised to learn they won't find any dinosaur bones here. The rock layers of the Grand Canyon are simply older than dinosaurs. This fact alone can be shocking: staring at its walls means staring at marine fossils from as far back as 1.2 billion years ago. Some of its caves hold the remains of ancient mammals. The canyon is a window into a world that existed long before the dinosaurs, when the land that is now Arizona lay beneath a shallow sea.

7

The park is bigger than Rhode Island

Numbers alone rarely capture the Grand Canyon's scale, so here's a different approach. Rhode Island covers about 1,214 square miles, and the Grand Canyon National Park spans 1,904 square miles.

The canyon's depth exceeds four Empire State Buildings (which is 1,454 feet) stacked on top of one another. That’s 6,093 feet at its deepest point.

8

But it's not the deepest canyon on Earth

For all its grandeur, the Grand Canyon does not hold the depth record. Pictured above, the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon in Tibet, China, plunges to 17,567 feet, which is nearly three times deeper. Carved by the Yarlung Tsangpo River as it cuts through the eastern Himalayas, that canyon is so remote and extreme that it remained largely uncharted until the late 20th century.

9

It is home to a pink rattlesnake found nowhere else on Earth

The Grand Canyon Pink Rattlesnake has a pinkish-red coloring that matches the canyon's own distinctive rock walls so closely that it's nearly invisible. It is found nowhere else in the world. Officially classified as Crotalus oreganus abyssus , it has darker diamond-shaped markings along its back that deepen the camouflage further.

10

There's a village at the bottom: Supai Village

For over 1,000 years, the remote village of Supai has been home to the Havasupai Tribe, the People of the Blue-Green Waters. It is located an eight-mile hike from the rim, but sits roughly 3,000 feet deep inside the Grand Canyon.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has called it the most remote community in the contiguous United States, and it has no automobiles and no road access. The only ways in are on foot, by mule, or by helicopter. It is also the only place in the United States where the postal service still delivers mail by mule train.

1

A gorilla suit

Image: ARTISTIC FRAMES

Space can get boring. It got a little more entertaining for astronaut Scott Kelly in 2016, when his twin brother, Mark Kelly, sent him a vacuum-sealed gorilla suit all the way to the ISS for his birthday.

Kelly’s crewmates didn’t know about it, so he had fun pranking them by suddenly appearing in the suit aboard the station. One of the prank videos went viral. As Kelly put it: "How can you not like space gorilla?"

2

Dirt from Yankee Stadium

Image: Chanan Greenblatt

Astronaut Garrett Reisman, a lifelong Yankees fan, of course, took a little piece of the Bronx to orbit . In 2008, aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour on mission STS-123, he brought a vial of dirt from Yankee Stadium’s pitcher’s mound—along with other Yankees memorabilia, including items autographed by players.

3

Amelia Earhart’s watch

Image: Tomas Martinez

In 2010, astronaut Shannon Walker brought Amelia Earhart’s watch to the International Space Station. The legendary aviator had worn it during two transatlantic flights , and it traveled to space on the 82nd anniversary of her first historic solo flight across the Atlantic.

4

Pizza

Image: Alan Hardman

Space pizza finally became a reality in 2001, when Pizza Hut paid millions to deliver a vacuum-sealed pizza to the International Space Station.

It was, quite literally, a publicity stunt out of this world . The pizza—topped with salami to withstand space conditions—was eaten by Russian cosmonaut Yuri Usachov aboard the ISS.

5

Pieces of the Wright Brothers’ first plane

Image: History in HD

Tucked into Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit was a small piece of fabric and a fragment of wood from the Wright Brothers' 1903 Flyer—carried all the way from Kitty Hawk to the Sea of Tranquility . He took them with him as he became the first person to step onto the Moon in 1969.

6

A set of instruments to play "Jingle Bells"

Image: Ali Rashedi

Just before Christmas in 1965, astronauts Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford pulled off a surprise serenade in space.

They had smuggled a harmonica and a set of sleigh bells aboard their Gemini 6A mission and played "Jingle Bells" for Mission Control—creating the first musical performance ever in space . The instruments are now on display at the Smithsonian Institution.

7

Several LEGO pieces

Image: Eugene Chystiakov

NASA's collaboration with LEGO took a literal leap when, in 2011, sets of LEGO bricks were sent to the International Space Station aboard mission STS-133.

Astronauts assembled models—such as the Hubble Space Telescope—in microgravity, engaging students around the world in STEM education.

8

A Buzz Lightyear toy

Image: Brian McGowan

Buzz Lightyear truly went " to infinity and beyond " when a 12-inch action figure flew aboard Space Shuttle Discovery in 2008. Spending 15 months on the International Space Station, Buzz was part of NASA’s educational outreach efforts.

Upon return, he was honored with a parade at Disney World and now resides in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

9

A lightsaber

Image: superneox lightsaber

In a nod to sci-fi fandom, a lightsaber prop used by Mark Hamill in Return of the Jedi journeyed to space aboard Space Shuttle Discovery in 2007.

The initiative celebrated the 30th anniversary of Star Wars , symbolizing the intersection of science fiction and real-world space exploration.

10

Dinosaur bones

Image: Jesper Aggergaard

In 1985, during NASA's SpaceLab 2 mission, astronaut Loren Acton brought aboard a fossilized bone and a piece of eggshell from Maiasaura peeblesorum , a dinosaur species known for nurturing its young.

These fossils, discovered in Montana , were sent to space to symbolize the connection between Earth’s prehistoric life and space exploration.​

11

Communion bread and wine

Image: James Coleman

In a very profound gesture, Buzz Aldrin privately took Christian communion aboard Apollo 11. As a Presbyterian elder , he carried a tiny wafer and a small pouch of wine, blessing them while orbiting the Moon shortly after the lunar landing.

12

Golf clubs (and golf balls)

Image: Peter Drew

During Apollo 14, Alan Shepard secretly packed a makeshift 6-iron —a golf club head duct-taped to a lunar tool—and two golf balls.

On live TV, he took a couple of awkward, one-handed swings while wearing his stiff spacesuit. The first ball flopped; the second soared "miles and miles," Shepard joked. It actually traveled about 40 yards, which is quite impressive in lunar terms.