1

Michael Jackson’s chimpanzee

Image: MediaEcke

At his Neverland ranch, the King of Pop had his own zoo with exotic animals such as exotic birds, an albino python, two tigers named Thriller and Sabu, and even an elephant, a gift from Liz Taylor. But by far, Michael Jackson’s favorite pet was Bubbles, a chimpanzee he introduced as his son and followed him everywhere.

You‘re probably wondering what happened to Bubbles, right? Well, you'll be glad to know that the 41-year-old chimpanzee now leads a quiet and normal life. He lives at the Center for Great Apes in Wauchula, Florida, where he pursues unique hobbies such as painting. Surely, Michael would be happy to see his beloved pet living a nice retirement.

2

Audrey Hepburn’s fawn deer

Image: Jen Dries

The mythical actress Audrey Hepburn had one of the most unique pets in Hollywood history: a baby deer named Pippin. This beautiful and gentle animal seems to match perfectly with the grace and elegance of the actress who captivated the hearts of fans around the world, don't you think?

Hepburn met Pippin in 1958 during the filming of Green Mansions and fell in love at first sight. The actress adopted the fawn and brought it to her Beverly Hills home, where it quickly made friends with Mr. Famous, the family dog.

3

Elvis Presley’s kangaroo

Image: Iván Lojko

Throughout his life, the King of Rock and Roll kept several pets at his beloved Graceland. But did you know one of them was a kangaroo? Yes, exactly! In addition to horses, dogs, a chimpanzee named Scatter, birds, and a squirrel monkey, Elvis had a kangaroo given to him by his agent Lee Gordon in 1957. Elvis tried to train it, but when he eventually failed, he gave it to the Memphis Zoo.

4

Melanie Griffith’s (many) lions, tigers, and cheetahs

Image: Glen Carrie

When Melanie Griffith was a teenager, her mother, the famous actress Tippi Hedren, decided to make a film about endangered lions. An animal trainer warned her that if she wanted to learn more about these felines, she had to "live with them for a while".

So the whole family moved to a ranch in California and adopted cheetahs, tigers, cougars, and lions. What was supposed to be a five-week shoot turned into five years. On one occasion, Melanie was attacked by a lion, resulting in over 50 stitches and reconstructive surgery on her face. The experience was so negative that the actresses now advocate for a ban on the exotic cat trade.

5

George Clooney's Vietnamese pot-bellied pig

Image: Jez Timms

Did you know that George Clooney once had a pet pig? In 1988, his then-girlfriend, actress Kelly Preston, gave him a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig as a gift. The animal grew to 300 lbs and lived with the Hollywood star for 18 years.

But that's not all! In 1994, when the infamous Northridge Earthquake that caused 72 deaths, 12,000 injuries, and $25 billion in losses hit Los Angeles, Max saved his owner's life. Clooney claims he was born again that day and will be forever grateful to his furry friend.

6

Reese Witherspoon’s donkeys

Image: Erwan Hesry

Reese Witherspoon is a big fan of animals. Owner of an entire farm, she tends to at least three dogs, two piglets, twenty chickens, three goats, and a pony.

But her most famous pets are Honky and Tonky, two incredible miniature donkeys that she and her children play with frequently.

7

Nicolas Cage’s albino cobras

Image: Anilsharma26

Nicolas Cage is well known for his bold and eccentric personality, both on and off the screen. He has a passion for exotic animals, so it's no wonder he once adopted two albino cobras —one of the rarest and most venomous snakes in the world— as pets.

Despite spending tens of thousands of dollars on them, his love for these rare reptiles caused him major legal and safety challenges, forcing him to reconsider his decision. Ultimately, he decided to send them to a professional wildlife center, ensuring they received the best care.

8

Paris Hilton’s kinkajou

Image: Aramburu Carlos, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Paris Hilton is known for her extravagant lifestyle. In addition to lavish mansions, closets full of designer clothes and shoes, and expensive jewelry, the hotel heiress invests much of her fortune in pets. That's how, in 2005, she adopted a kinkajou she named Baby Luv.

You're probably wondering what a kinkajou even is. Kinkajous are wild mammals native to the rainforest, relatives of raccoons and coatis. Their large, round eyes and playful nature make them seem like ideal pets, but in reality, they shouldn't be taken out of the wild. Paris learned this the hard way: the animal bit her arm, and she had to be hospitalized. After the incident, the socialite had to relocate Baby Luv to a wildlife sanctuary.

9

Miley Cyrus’ pig

Image: Forest Simon

Miley Cyrus is a well-known animal advocate who collaborates directly with PETA. She has a home farm where she lives with seven dogs, two horses, two ponies, several cats, and until 2019, a pig.

Of all her companions, Pig Pig was the recurring star on the singer's Instagram account. Miley adopted her in August 2014 after her dog, Floyd, died. Sadly, five years later, Miley had to share some bad news with her thousands of followers: "Very sad to say... my dear friend Pig Pig has passed away," she wrote.

10

Mike Tyson’s tiger

Image: Alicia Chong

The famous boxer Mike Tyson kept a considerable number of big cats as pets. But his favorite was a female Bengal tiger he named Kenya. They lived together for almost two decades, and it was amazing to see him next to the 550-pound animal. The former champion was in charge of feeding her, they walked together, and she even slept in his bed.

Tyson was never afraid of animals considered dangerous. But when the tiger began to age, it became too risky to keep her in the house. Eventually, he was forced to get rid of Kenya.

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

Rachel Jackson: A "Bigamy" scandal (1820s)

In 1791, a young Andrew Jackson married Rachel Donelson. Both believed her first husband, Captain Lewis Robards, had successfully finalized their divorce. Apparently, Robards didn’t file the petition, making her marriage to Jackson technically bigamous. Once the divorce went through in 1794, they officially remarried.

During the 1828 presidential campaign, Jackson’s political opponents used this legal mistake against him. They branded Rachel a loose woman and a bigamist in pamphlets scattered across the country. The intense public shaming broke her spirit and deteriorated her health. She suffered a fatal heart attack just days before Jackson’s inauguration, leaving the newly elected president heartbroken and extremely bitter toward his political rivals for the rest of his life.

2

Grover Cleveland’s illegitimate child (1884)

Decades later, another personal bombshell rocked another presidential race. Republican opponents revealed that Democratic nominee Grover Cleveland, a bachelor praised for his integrity, had fathered a child out of wedlock with a widow called Maria Halpin ten years before.

Republicans paraded through the streets chanting, "Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa?" Instead of denying the affair or trying to bury it, Cleveland instructed his campaign managers to do something radical: "Tell the truth." He admitted to supporting the child financially. His honesty caught his opponents off guard and won over voters who were tired of such dirty political tactics.

3

The Crédit Mobilier scandal (1872)

This particular scandal stands as one of the most shameless corporate schemes of the Gilded Age. Stockholders of the Union Pacific Railroad formed a fraudulent construction company called Crédit Mobilier of America . Then, they hired themselves to build the transcontinental railroad at inflated prices, pocketing tens of millions of dollars in federal subsidies.

To prevent Congress from investigating their profit margins, Congressman Oakes Ames distributed discounted shares of the company’s stock to influential politicians, including Vice President Schuyler Colfax. When the press exposed the story in 1872, the revelation that lawmakers were bribing themselves tarnished the legacy of the Ulysses S. Grant administration.

4

The Whiskey Ring scandal (1875)

A few years later, another financial disaster hit the Grant administration. The Whiskey Ring was a widespread conspiracy involving distillers, distributors, and internal federal tax officials who stole millions of dollars in liquor taxes.

Using a complex web of bribes and falsified records, the ring defrauded the U.S. Treasury. The scandal reached the inner circle of power when President Grant’s own private secretary, Orville Babcock, was indicted as a ringleader. Grant provided a deposition in his secretary’s defense. While this saved Babcock from prison, it permanently damaged the president’s reputation.

5

The Teapot Dome scandal (1920s)

Until Watergate occurred, Teapot Dome was synonymous with political corruption. During the administration of Warren G. Harding, Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall took control of valuable federal oil reserves located at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and Elk Hills, California.

Instead of opening these fields up for competitive bidding among energy companies, Fall secretly leased the drilling rights to private oil tycoons in exchange for more than $400,000 in bribes.

6

The Chappaquiddick incident (1969)

By the mid-20th century, the nature of political scandals shifted. Secrets began to involve personal crisis and tragic losses.

In July 1969, Senator Edward "Ted" Kennedy drove his car off a narrow wooden bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts. The vehicle overturned into a tidal pond, trapping and drowning his passenger, 28-year-old campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne. Kennedy managed to escape but failed to report the fatal accident to the police for ten hours. Although he eventually pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, his delayed reaction ended his lifelong presidential ambitions.

7

The Pentagon Papers (1971)

In 1971, military analyst Daniel Ellsberg felt the moral obligation to leak a top-secret 7,000-page Department of Defense study detailing U.S. political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967.

Published by The New York Times , the papers exposed a disturbing truth: successive administrations had systematically lied to both Congress and the American public. The documents proved that the government had expanded the war and increased troop counts while knowing that the conflict was unwinnable. The Supreme Court eventually rejected the government’s attempts to block the leaks, making a victory for freedom of the press.

8

The Watergate scandal (1972–1974)

This is, probably, the ultimate American political scandal. In June 1972, five men were arrested breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C.

The break in itself was minor compared to the illegal cover-up orchestrated by President Richard Nixon and his collaborators. From paying hush money to instructing the CIA to block the FBI’s investigation, Nixon’s complicity was exposed via his own secret White House taping system. Facing impeachment and conviction by the Senate, Nixon became the first and only U.S. president to resign from office.

9

The "Keating Five" (Late 1980s)

During the Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s, five U.S. Senators—John McCain, Alan Cranston, Dennis DeConcini, John Glenn, and Donald Riegle—came under intense scrutiny.

The group was accused of intervening with federal banking regulators on behalf of Charles Keating, the chairman of Lincoln Savings and Loan, who had contributed to their political campaigns. Lincoln eventually collapsed, costing American taxpayers over $3 billion. Although the Senate Ethics Committee ultimately cleared the senators of corruption, they were publicly condemned.

10

The Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky affair (1998)

The 20th century ended with a scandal that blended personal infidelity with a constitutional crisis. In 1998, news broke that President Bill Clinton had an intimate relationship with a 21-year-old White House intern called Monica Lewinsky.

The affair turned into a legal battle when Clinton denied the relationship under oath during an unrelated sexual harassment lawsuit. The investigation led to Clinton’s impeachment by the House of Representatives on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. The Senate ultimately acquitted him, yet he couldn’t bypass the media circus.