Fearis an ancient emotion . The same fight - or - flight of steps response that gripped cave dweller stalked by a hungry cavalry sword - toothed tiger still grips modern humans when they sky dive for the first time . Our heart rate increase , blood is redirect to decisive consistence parts , adrenalinespikes , and our strength , stamina and senses are all heightened [ source : Taylor ] . In other news , we become frightened superheroes quick to fight severely or run tight depending on the situation . It ’s a chemical reaction that ’s served us well : Scientists credit it as an important part of the survival of our coinage .
Unfortunately , there have been many dreadful events in our history that have strike fearfulness in the hearts of mass across the world . In many of these illustration , the danger was impending and horrifyingly clean-cut , like the spate of a mushroom swarm lift over Hiroshima in 1945 or the tsunami undulation rolling toward the beaches of Indonesia in 2004 .
Other times , however , the threat was less obvious and reverence dwell in the drab obscure . Will a natural disaster happen and wipe out your town ? Might a consecutive killer strike your neighborhood and endanger your kinfolk ? Could an astronomic outcome impact the Earth and all life on it ? Will a regional conflict become world and spark World War III ? It ’s from this angle — a care of the uncertain — that we compiled our list of 10 anxiousness - inducing events in chronicle .
10: Y2K
TheY2 K bugwas big news in December 1999 . horrific predictions of inadvertent missile launching , nuclear meltdown , financial affright and airplanes fall from the sky had people build bunkers and stock them withSpam . Wilderness - endurance iron boot camps raise participants like never before . Even the venerated Time magazine publisher set up a author - powered " war room " in the basement of their building . Despite reassurances from expert , people were worried . So what was this Y2 K bug , and why was it turning otherwise normal people into end - of - timers ?
Y2 K was a data processor hemipteran . A altogether avoidable computer hemipteran . The whole problem started back in the 1960s when computer programmers , touch about disbursal and limitations of digital repositing , write codification that only allowed two finger’s breadth for the year . So " 2025-05-01 , " for instance , would simply be ride as " 10/15/65 . " Everything was hunky-dory until the 1990s , when vexation grow that reckoner might interpret the looming year 2000 — known in computer - speak as " 00 " — as 1900 . calculation for everything from interest rate at bank to safety bank check at nuclear power facilities would be incorrect . In preparation , the United States spent zillion of dollars update military , transportation and fiscal computer systems [ generator : Rothman ] . Still , the job played on people ’s lingering fear of applied science , and the belief among some Christians that Jesus might come back 2,000 years after his birthing only escalated the concern [ source : Sheesley ] .
On Dec. 31 , 1999 , people watched with a slight more anxiety and a fiddling less solemnization as the clock ticked towards possible Armageddon . Then , at midnight , nothing chance . apart from a few small-scale , isolated incident , everything was fine . state that did n’t prepare were no bad off than those that did . And everyone take a breather a corporate suspiration of ease [ source : National Geographic ] .
9: Climate Change
Politics undoubtedly cloud the return ofclimate variety . But if 97 percent of actively publishing mood scientist , 18 American scientific connexion , 200 general scientific governance , and legion scientific discipline academy , U.S. authorities agencies and intergovernmental bodies are right about human - caused climate change , you should be afraid . Very afraid [ source : Shaftel ] .
Here are the facts . Sea horizontal surface have risen 6.7 inch ( 17 cm ) over the past hundred . As of 2016 , the 10 warm eld since 1880 have all happened within the past 12 years . Oceans are warm and acidifying . icing tack , Arctic sea ice , glaciersand C. P. Snow cover are all retreating [ source : NASA , " Climate Change " ] . And the drive of all these change , atmospheric carbon copy dioxide , has risen to concentrations that are unprecedented in human chronicle . In 2016 an authoritative mensuration post in Tasmania read grade exceeding 400 parts per million , which is higher than any time in the retiring 15 million yr [ beginning : Readfearn ] .
So what ’s the big muckle ? Some of the consequences of a heating satellite are already happening , including acceleratedsea rising , more intense rainfall , more life-threatening heat wave , increased wildfire and decreased urine handiness . A trend toward stronger and more frequenthurricanes , though not yet definitively tied to climate change , is also expected to accelerate .
Those in vulnerable areas , like the low - lying Pacific island nation of Kiribati , are especially concerned but determined to oppose back . That land ’s leader channelize a Japanese firm pull up plans for a floating island to nurture part of the country ’s population and purchased land on nearby Fiji to evacuate the eternal sleep [ author : Worland ] . While such actions may seem crazy now , they could one day try necessary . Scientists believe climate alteration will continue to affect the planet through this hundred and beyond [ source : NASA , " The upshot " ] .
8: Yellowstone Supervolcano Eruptions
Sometimes events that happened C of thousands or even millions of years ago are chilling , not because tons of hoi polloi were there to see them , but because they are prognosticative of what might happen in the hereafter .
Take the Yellowstonesupervolcanoeruptions , which materialise 2.1 million year ago , 1.3 million age ago and 640,000 geezerhood ago . The heavy of these eruptions was the oldest one , which created a volcanic shaping know as the Huckleberry Ridge Tuff . It released a whopping 585 three-dimensional miles ( 2,450 solid kilometers ) of molten rock and created a caldera assess some 60 naut mi ( 96.6 kilometers ) across . That makes it one of the five large individual volcanic events in history — nearly 6,000 times great than the Mt. St. Helens eruption of 1980 [ germ : Lowenstern et al . ] .
Yellowstone proceed to be an fighting volcanic zona , as its numerousgeysersand hot springs attest . What , then , would happen if there were another such eruption ? One of the braggy problems would be the massive amounts of ash thrown into the air , which lead would carry across the United States . The Pacific Northwest and Midwest would be particularly severely hit , resulting in a scant - terminus desolation of agribusiness and waterways choked with gray sludge . Such an eruption would also eject large amounts of gas pedal like atomic number 16 dioxide into the atmosphere , causing a decade - long climate chilling . The resulting changes in rainfall patterns and grave frosts could lead to more widespread crop failure [ seed : Oskin ] .
Do n’t miss too much sleep over this one , though : scientist say that the opportunity of a Yellowstonesuper - eruptionare passing low — at least over next few thousand class [ germ : Diggles ] .
7: The Great Clown Scare of 2016
Every decade is define in part by some quirky event or fad . The 1950s hadUFO sighting , the 1970s hadDisco Demolition Nightand the 1990s had people plump into survivalist mood in the months leading up to Y2K. What defines the 2010s ? plausibly people dressing up as creepy-crawly clowns and scaring the pants off of other the great unwashed .
It all started in August 2016 at an apartment complex in Greenville , South Carolina , where a male child told his mom about a frightening experience : Two clowns tried to lure him into the Wood outside their building [ source : Teague ] . The story was unsubstantiated , but ape soon emerged . A cleaning lady in Alabama created a Facebook Thomas Nelson Page for " Flomo Klown " and endanger to kill people at a local school . Police arrested a man in Kentucky who was dressed like a merry andrew and hiding in a ditch [ author : Teague ] . In just a few months , people had report more than 100 buffoon sighting and threat in the United States , and the phenomenon start to spread to other land , including England , Canada and Australia [ author : Shilling ] .
The public response was frightening as well . masses began threatening to dissipate clowns , and a mob even formed at Penn State University in response to a clown sighting . All the hysteria prompt writer Stephen King — whose murderous goofball eccentric Pennywise from his novelItprobably contributed to the buffoon craze — to issue a statement calling for people to cool it [ origin : Carlson ] .
All this begs the question : Why clowns ? Certainly , pop culture has conditioned us to venerate clowns , with fictional portrayals like those inItto genuine consequence like the serial murders committed by John Wayne Gacy , known in the military press as " The Killer Clown . " But there may be something more fundamental . For one , clowns are unpredictable : You never experience if they ’re going to squirt water on you or pull something from their sleeve . The magnified face paint also makes them unearthly — human , but in a strange and mysterious path . We just are n’t wired very well to deal with this doubt , and the Great Clown Scare is proof [ source : Romm ] .
6: European Witch Hunts
If you ’ve ever live on in a pocket-sized town , you know that small sleights or misinterpreted gestures can quickly become a with child mess when the local rumour mill kicking into gear . Rural Europe was no different during the late 16th and other 17th 100 . Well , on 2nd mentation , there was one vainglorious remainder : A reject neighbour in the late Renaissance Europe might accuse you of being awitch .
Take a second to imagine what that would be like . You bring some food over to a neighbour who ’s just had a babe , and the next daytime the youngster come down with a terrible sickness . Or perchance you get disturbed with someone and make a half - joking crack wishing him damage . You did n’t have in mind it ! But before you experience it , local official are drag out you off to a witch test where logic does n’t matter and torture is the preferred way to thread a confession . Hopefully you could somehow convince the superstitious public executioner that you are n’t awitch , but if not , you ’ll be hanged , decapitate or burned at the stake . Yikes !
By the belated 1700s , the Wiccan craze was largely over , but not before some 40,000 to 100,000 citizenry had been killed under such unconscionable circumstances as those observe above . Women — particularly elderly adult female — bore the brunt of this zealotry : Eighty percent of those savagely executed in this dark chapter of European story were distaff . But as the examples above show , these killings were n’t some kind of systematic cleansing by the Catholic Church to pass over out pre - Christian religions and the women who perpetuated them . The enchantress trial run , sadly , had more to do with petty , vindictive and superstitious accuser who were endow by low-spirited - horizontal surface local authorities [ origin : Miller ] .
5: Earth Passes Through the Tail of Halley’s Comet
By 1910 the sight of Halley ’s Comet was n’t a surprisal . As ahead of time as 1705 astronomerEdmond Halleyidentified its orbit and presage its return every 75 to 76 year . He correctly guessed its reaching in 1759 , and the comet dazzled the night sky again in 1835 . Thoughtelescopesweren’t yet strong enough to traverse its remote progress , everyone expected another sighting in 1910 . That was n’t the scary part [ source : Weissman ] .
What stirred everyone into a tizzy was the new discovery that Earth was in reality on track to pass through the comet ’s 15.5 - million - mi ( 25 - million - kilometer ) can . Making things worse , a recently - distinguish proficiency experience as spectroscopy was used to analyze the penning of the comet , and scientists check something unsettling — namely that the fundament take a toxic accelerator lie with as cyanogen . While most astronomer were n’t in reality that disquieted , a uneasy populace latched on to the claims of the great unwashed like French astronomer and author Camille Flammarion , who claimed the poisonous substance would smother all life sentence on the planet . It was a recipe for mass hysteria .
Churches moderate petition vigil , and enterprising con - man sold comet birth control pill to guard off the poison ’s essence . Even wilder theories emerge suggest that the comet ’s gravity might cast off off Earth ’s tide and induce the Pacific to empty itself into the Atlantic . Despite thedoomsday predictions , however , nothing happened . Halley ’s Comet came again in 1986 , and with any fate , we ’ll all see it again in 2061 [ source : Clark ] .
4: Washington, D.C., Sniper Attacks
Murder is one of the most heinous acts a person can commit , and unfortunately , it is all too coarse in our society . Usually , victims know the sea wolf . But in some horrifying cases , murdererschoose to shoot down people at random . That was the terrific realism during the D.C.sniperattacks of 2002 .
On Oct. 2 , John Allen Muhammed and Lee Boyd Malvo climbed into a blue Chevrolet Caprice and headed toward an Aspen Hill , Maryland , wiliness shop on a lethal mission . Their first shot shattered the windowpane of the fund but narrowly missed the cashier ’s forefront . Having flunk at their first effort , the twosome moved on to a market store where they killed a humankind walking across the parking lot . The shooting continued for the next three workweek , claiming victims at a gas post , domicile improvement storage , middle school and other ordinary public places [ germ : Philofsky ] .
As you’re able to imagine , people were rattle . Kids abide home from school , sporting events were cancel and people enshroud while pump gas . Mercifully , police force were able to key out Muhammed and Malvo as suspect and capture them at a residue point , but not before they killed 10 people and wound three others . Their motives were indecipherable . Perhaps it was an elaborated plot to cover up the planned slaying of Muhammed ’s X - married woman , or even part of a bigger architectural plan to extort the federal politics . Whatever the cause for the spree , it remains one of the scary model of serial killing in American account [ source : White ] .
3: Cuban Missile Crisis
" As I walk out [ of the President ’s Oval Office ] I thought I might never live to see another Saturday night " [ beginning : National Security Archive ] . Now that ’s a scary quote no matter who say it and what they were verbalise about . But when you realize that it was John F. Kennedy ’s Secretary of Defense , Robert McNamara , taking about a possiblenuclear strikeagainst the United States , it ’s downright terrifying . It just goes to show how end the world came to all - out nuclear war during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis .
The issue at hand was the Soviet Union ’s use of Cuba as a launch pad fornuclear weaponscapable of striking the United States . Kennedy had warned Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev not to do it , so when American spy planes identified missile launch sites on the communist island nation , thing got tense . Really tense . On Oct. 22 , Kennedy regulate a naval quarantine of Cuba so as to prevent soviet from delivering any vile weapons . Negotiations move on for six days while the United States Strategic Air Command , which was responsible for the res publica ’s strategic nuclear strike forces , stand at DEFCON 2 , the high level of readiness ever order [ source : U.S. Department of State ] .
Thankfully , cooler heads reign , or else none of us might be here . On Oct. 28 , Khrushchev agreed to transfer the missiles from Cuba in exchange for an American promise not to invade the island , as well as the withdrawal of American missiles from Turkey . The brush with nuclear war was a wakeup call to the rival superpowers , which plant a direct telephone line between the Kremlin and the White House as a outcome [ source : State Department ] .
2: The United States Nearly Loses John Glenn and the Friendship 7 Spacecraft
Sometimes one soul ’s scary event can have a ripple burden across a land . That ’s exactly what fall out on Feb. 20 , 1962 , when Americans curb their collective breath as spaceman John Glenn and theFriendship 7spacecraft orbited 160 international nautical mile ( 257 kilometers ) above Earth at a font - meld 17,500 miles per hour ( 28,164 kilometre per time of day ) . On the lineage was national superbia and confidence in the body politic ’s ability to compete with its Soviet contender .
At the meter of Glenn ’s feat , the Soviet Union was outflank the United States in theSpace Race , having already sent the first planet and somebody into blank . Glenn would be the first American to orbit the Earth , but as he prepare to re - enter the atmosphere , he got some bad news from Mission Control : A sensing element detected a problem with the heat shield . consider this was the only thing stick out between him and sealed , fiery death , it was a bit come to . As Glenn descended , he observe burning chunk of ballistic capsule fly by his window , diffident whether these were pieces of the decisive oestrus carapace . Fortunately , they were n’t , as the detector that raised the alarm turn out to be incorrect , and Glenn landed in the Atlantic without incident .
So what was the big deal ? In the 1960s space technology was viewed as a decisive component in the atomic arms wash . If Glenn had go wrong , a struggle space program would have raised some existent doubt about the United States ' interior defense capability . But or else , the heroic Glenn correct the microscope stage for the ultimate American space victory : Landing a man on the Sun Myung Moon [ author : National Archives ] .
1: 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami
Beachgoers , lark in the warm waters of Indonesia ’s Indian coast , face up and see a strange sight on the horizon : A swell of water . But oddity turns to panic as the swell nears res publica and amplifies into a 100 - foot ( 30 - measure ) wave hell - dead set on destroying everything in its path .
It all started on Dec. 26 , 2004 , when a 9.1 - magnitudeearthquakeshook the bottom of the Indian Ocean with the force of 23,000 atomic turkey . The motion of the seafloor thrust atsunamiin all counselling , like the rippling of a Isidor Feinstein Stone sky in a pond . By the time the waters receded , nearly 228,000 people in 14 countries were dead , and some community in hard - hit Indonesia were almost all wiped off the map [ source : Folger ] .
Just as scary as the tsunami itself is the possibility that a deadly outcome could bechance again — despite the initiation of an early detective work system in the Indian Ocean . See , the Indonesian island of Sumatra sits mightily next to a hyperactive error geographical zone . Even if Sumatran residents are directly warned , they may only have 30 minutes to evacuate . That ’s nowhere close to enough fourth dimension , in particular in large city where evacuation road could quick go with car [ source : Folger ] .
Lots More Information
From the tangible ( climate change , tsunami , supervolcanoes ) to the perceived ( Y2 K , creepy clown , Halley ’s Comet ) , scary events are a huge part of our portion out human history . In fact , there are so many things we ’ve been frightened of over the years that it was hard to narrow down down the tilt . So how do we handle these situations ? I ’d like to think we respond with thoughtful , positive action mechanism , but judge from these events it seems mass delirium is a more usual reaction . Now is n’t that a shivery mentation ?
