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67 Creepy And Mind-Boggling Things That Were Mysteries Until Humans Finally Cracked The Case
Science has come a long way in the last hundred years. We now have life-saving antibiotics like penicillin, we understand what wiped out the dinosaurs, and astrophysicists have even figured out how to take images of black holes. While we still have a long way to go when it comes to answering all of life’s questions, there’s no reason why we can’t celebrate how far humanity has come.
If you’d like to be reminded of some of the most mind-blowing discoveries humans have made, you’ve come to the right place, pandas. Redditors have been discussing former mysteries that are now solved, so we’ve gathered their most fascinating replies below. Enjoy reading through these responses, and be sure to upvote the ones that make you thankful to live in a time with so many scientific advancements!
This post may include affiliate links.
#1
In 1981, a Soviet submarine ran aground in Swedish waters. This was a huge deal - although the Soviets claimed the sub was in distress and didn’t purposefully enter Swedish waters, basically everyone in Sweden saw it as evidence that their waters were being invaded by spy subs. Plus, they did some snooping of their own and determined that the sub was emitting radiation, meaning it had nukes on board. So they went along with the Soviets’ clearly false claim about an accident and helped get the sub out of there, but panic was in the air.
So the Swedes did exactly what you’d expect, and they prepared for more Soviet subs. I mean, when you see one Soviet sub, surely there are more, right? So Sweden developed advanced acoustic technology to detect subs and they created a plan to basically seal off their waters when they heard a sub. And wouldn’t you know it, a year later, they found a Soviet sub! Well, they didn’t *find* it, but they absolutely heard it. And they cut off the bay and figured they just had to hunt the sub down. But after a month, they couldn’t find it. They gave up and reopened the bay, but they assumed the sub found a way out. But they’ll get it next time! And then it happened again, but they couldn’t find it again. And then again and again with no clear pattern for a decade. What the heck!
Thankfully, the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. So... no more subs, right? Nyet! Because the Russian subs were still coming! Wait, what?
Okay, so now nothing is making sense. At this point, the Swedish military brought in outside experts to figure out what was happening. This included oceanographer-types who were obvious experts in the surrounding waters. The military then played the audio evidence of the Soviet submarines, only to be told they weren’t submarines at all - they were *fish*, and the propeller-like sound was water being released from their swim bladders.
And that’s the story of how the Swedish military spent ten years and tens of millions of dollars chasing fish farts.
Liliana Spiro 17 hours ago
The USSR had to officially apologize and paid up a compensatory sum of 1.5 million Swedish Kronor, equivalent to $166 195 or €140 630.
RELATED:
#2
The disappearance of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of The Little Prince, who was also a French reconnaissance pilot during World War II.
In 1944, he took off on a reconnaissance mission from Corsica and never made it back, and there was never any evidence of what might have happened to him and his plane.
Finally, in 1998, a French fisherman pulled up his net and found wrapped in it a silver bracelet engraved with Saint-Exupery's name, and in 2004, a diver searched in the area and found the remains of his plane, which had apparently been shot down by a German fighter after all.
TotallyNOTAFox 5 hours ago (edited)
He flew a Lockheed P-38 "Lightning" and it's assumed that he tried to get extra footage of a harbour used by the Kriegsmarine on the way back (can't remember which town it was)
#3
In the 30s to early 40s, Kodak noticed that the X-ray film that they produced strayed developing while still in the box, even when not exposed to light at all. The company did a full audit of their manufacturing plants and couldn’t find any material that emits X-rays. Finally, they turned to the cardboard boxes that held the film. They had one company contracted to produce them and the company have plants along the Mississippi River. It was then determined that the water from the Mississippi River used to produce the cardboard had a significant concentration of radioactive fallout. The fallout was determined to be the chain descending from U-238, which is the primary fuel used in nuclear bombs. Kodak discovered that the US military was developing and testing nuclear bombs West of the Mississippi, which shot fallout into the air and the winds carried it and rained it over the plains that drain into the river.
TotallyNOTAFox 5 hours ago
Isotope U-235 is the one used in nuclear fission, or does this refer to Plutonium-239?
#4
I have one that most people seem to not know about. Grand Duchess Anastasia was in fact [unalived] with the rest of her family in 1918. She never escaped and the several women throughout the 20th century claiming to be her lied.
The site of the [death penalty] of the Tsar and his family was completely untouched until 1991. Excavation found only 9 of the 11 expected remains. It wasn't until 2007 that two further sets of remains were found a small distance away from the previous grave site. DNA testing found that one of the sets of remains belonged to Tsarevich Alexei and the other to one of his sisters. With this find, it proved conclusively that the entire Imperial family was in fact [unalived] and buried in 1918.
#5
Bermuda Triangle / devils sea...
a triangle shaped section of ocean where airplanes and boats were known to disappear.
Apparently most stories were embellished, and there is so much traffic that goes through the area it’s actually a very small amount of vessels that go missing (percentage wise).
CoryBlk:
I remember when I was a kid my dad telling me that the Bermuda Triangle was nonsense. I remember him saying that more ships have sunk in Lake Superior than the triangle.
Danthropologist 2 hours ago
When I was a kid I thought that the Bermuda triangle, along with quicksand, rattlesnakes and piranhas were going to have a much more detrimental effect on my life than they actually have
#6
Crop Circles. Even after the guys showed how the did it on TV, some idiots still believe it’s aliens.
Huddo's sister 14 hours ago
The episode of QI that had a few guys demonstrating how that did it was interesting, though I wasn't surprised.
#7
I feel like the finding of the Rosetta Stone has to be up there. Suddenly, after thousands of years you can start to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs? That was a long wait with an amazing payoff.
#8
What's the purpose of the appendix really ... it keeps your good bacteria safe.
LillieMean 14 hours ago
And my trip down the rabbit hole yielded the result that removing the appendix can thus affect the immune system and expose you to inflammatory bowel diseases because the good bacteria have gone with the appendix. The change in the microbial population also slows down recovery from diarrhea, for example.
#9
I am gonna go in a different direction here I will say finding out what actually causes sickness. For much of humanity this argument had fierce advocates of miasma to why did you make God give you leprosy? The black plague and a pope surrounding himself with candles which attracted fleas and allowed his survival is the greatest doesn't matter it worked ever.
anonymous:
It’s hard to exaggerate the impact Germ theory had on the world. The fact that now you can have one child and expect it to live to adulthood is unheard of throughout human history. Even for royalty.
That and figuring out how to make Ammonia from the air are what made modern day life possible.
#10
In the 1970s, a number of Japanese citizens disappeared from coastal areas in Japan. After many years it was found out that North Korea had abducted them.
Most of the missing were in their 20s; the youngest, Megumi Yokota, was 13 when she disappeared in November 1977, from the Japanese west coast city of Niigata.
#11
El Dorado or the lost city of gold turned out to be a mistranslation. It was just the name of some guy that got mistranslated to the name of a city.
#12
The Marfa Mystery Lights.
Small town in west Texas has lights that can be seen dancing off the horizon in a certain spot some nights. For many years the source of the light was not known and explanations ranged from mass hysteria to the ever popular UFO.
One researcher finally figured it out. The elevation changes and desert air would occassionally combine to distort and project headlights from cars on a highway several miles away. Reports of the mystery lights from times prior to the highway or automobiles, are probably campfires in the general area of the highway. Like many highways, the area was already used as a road for quite a long time.
#13
1947 an British South American Airways aircraft named Star Dust disappeared, it's last message was simply "STENDEC". After an exhausting search, no trace of the aircraft was found. For years conspiracy theories and talk of Alien abduction by wackos circulated.
Till 1998, when mountain climbers on a remote mountain found an engine, pieces of metal, and clothing at the bottom of a glacier on the side of Mount Tupungato. Turns out the aircraft got caught flying the wrong way in the jet stream while it was flying at night and using a system of timing when to start their decent. Being in the jet stream reduced their airspeed in relation to the earth and they smacked themselves straight into the side of a mountain, after which an avalanche covered the wreckage. The wreckage took decades to flow down the side of the mount with the glaciers. The glacier preserved the wreck so well that 50 years later the recovery team found identifiable remains, personal items, and could read serial numbers on the engines. Amazing one of the landing gear tires was still inflated, and that teams continued to visit the site for periodically as more of the aircraft, cargo, and remains of passengers are still emerging from the ice.
#14
The Prophet Hen of Leeds. A hen was laying eggs with messages like "Christ is Coming" and people thought the world was ending. Turned out the farmer was actually writing on the eggs herself, and then reinserted it back into the chicken.
Liliana Spiro 18 hours ago
Awful on so many levels, of course, but what lingers with me is mainly: poor chicken!
#15
Weeping Jesus statue in India mystery. Apparently a Jesus statue started crying and all Christians along with Hindus started to drink it. It turned out to be sewage.
#16
The Bloop.
tl;dr in 1997 a really weird and loud noise was detected underwater and everyone was all "WTH was that?". In 2012 it was determined it was an iceberg breaking and/or rubbing against the seabed.
#17
What Deinocheirus looked like.
When I was a kid in the 80s, all that was known were the bones of the arms with enormous claws. Hence its name, "terrible hand". They were mostly shown grasping a small car because they were so freaking huge. The rest of the animal was a complete mystery. Was it like a giant Allosaurus, one that'd make the T-Rex look like a puppy in comparison? A few years later it seemed more likely to be ostrich-like and an omnivore. Either way, given how rare it is for fossils to form at all, I was convinced I'd die never knowing what this dinosaur actually looked like.
Then surprisingly in 2014, they found more bones and it was just the weirdest thing.
#18
Fast Radio Bursts, or FRBs. First discovered in 2007, its a radio pulse a few milliseconds long typically coming from extra galactic sources. In April of 2020 the CHIME radio telescope found the first one recorded in the milky-way. The source was a magnatar; a highly magnetic remnant of a large dead star. Magnatars are a special kind of neutron star because they have such an intensely strong magnetic field. If a magnatar was a moons distance away it would be able to rip your car keys out of your pocket.
What causes these FRBs is a magnatar quake. Magnatars are so dense that the surface is under a lot of strain to collapse in toward the core but the physical density of the neutron star is holding it back. A very slight shift in the crust of the magnatar releases a huge burst of x-rays/gamma-rays along with radio waves. And that is the Fast Radio Bursts we see.
#19
It's a personal favorite, but finding Richard III. I've always been obsessed with the history of the Wars of the Roses so seeing him found in my lifetime *and* seeing the evidence of his scoliosis and his battle wounds after centuries of wondering if it was all just Tudor propaganda was...monumental. Sent shivers down my spine that this incredibly polarizing man who lived an incredibly interesting life and, by all accounts, had an equally epic death was just stumbled upon underneath a parking lot after 600 years. Dumped in his grave like so much laundry.
Serena Myers 9 hours ago
His remains were found under a car park in Leicester, Uk. He was identified through a combination of mitochondrial DNA, radiocarbon dating, and forensic evidence of scoliosis and fatal battle wounds consistent with historical accounts.
#20
The Andreen McDonald case. She and her husband Andre (yes, Andreen and Andre) originally were from Jamaica. They moved up to my town in Texas where Andre was air force and Andreen was a body building business owner. Andre was pretty jealous that Andreen was more successful and was constantly begging/demanding that she make him co-owner of her company. She always said no.
One day he had had it, and "did away with her". The gym that she frequented, every single morning, got concerned when she stopped showing up. She was very close with the ladies that she worked out with, and even gave them a key to her house. She told them that if she ever went missing, that her husband probably did it, and they knew he had an attitude.
So one day while Andre was out, the ladies went to check on Andreen. Her car was there, her wallet was there, but she wasn't. They found blood and hair in her bathroom.
That's when cops were called.
Cops showed up when Andre was home and asked about Andreen. He said she was in the hospital. They asked him, "if she's in the hospital, how come her wallets here?" He responded simply, "talk to my lawyer"
They got a warrant and were able to search the house further. Saw *more* leftover evidence in the bathroom, and evidence of clothes had been found burned in the fire pit in the backyard.
But no body.
So all they could do was charge him with a missing persons deal.
Andre was super snarky about it too. How he'd be proven innocent. How the cops would never catch on.
Little did he realize how loved Andreen was. And how much Texas ranchers hate corrupt and snarky m**derers. Crowds gathered daily and were given permission to sweep over rancher's land for any sign of Andreen's body.
Just as crowds started feeling defeated, and Andre started to see hope of being released, a rancher was scoping his field. He had heard coyotes out and went to see what could have entised them. Sure enough, he found human bones, later identified as Andreen.
So yeah, proper charges were able to be filed.
**Add on:**
So some ask why she stayed or why he felt jealous that she was more successful. Remember they're from Jamaica. The whole point of coming here was to better themselves, and bring pride to their families. So she was doing great, but because she was doing so good, his family was kind of looking down on him because his wife was better/more successful than him.
And then she stayed with him, mainly because she wanted to try and make sure their daughters life could be as normal as possible. (sucks that that kind of backfired for her, but now she's being taken care of by her aunt and grandma who both love and support her).
#21
Roman concrete that resisted sea water, and the missing Roanoke colony.
The lost recipe for the concrete turned out to be something we misinterpreted, and the Roanoke colony was abandoned because the settlers decided to live and mix with the natives. DNA tracing was able to connect this.
#22
Whether the city of Troy really existed or was just legend. It did. Some German guy who got rich in early industrialization used his wealth to search for it. Pretty much all the scholars of the time said it was a fools errand. Then he actually found it.
Liliana Spiro 17 hours ago
"Some German guy"?! Sheesh, that's one way of putting it... The renowned businessman and architect Heinrich Schliemann is credited with discovering the ancient city of Troy in 1870–1871. He identified its location at the Hisarlik mound in Turkey. It was the British archeologist, Frank Calvert, who first identified the site.
#23
Where is the Titanic?
(Most people don't realize that half of the people in the world grew up when the ship's location was still a complete mystery.
Now, it's old news.
#24
Mary Toft. I mean, really, what the heck.
TL;DR: (NSFW) Woman starts giving birth to copious amounts of rabbit parts. Woman taken to London and studied under intense supervision, turns out she was shoving the pieces up there days before for the publicity.
#25
The Windsor Hum.
Residents of Windsor (Canada) have been saying they could hear a hum coming from across the river in Detroit for the better part of a few decades. Well turns out that when a steel producer turned their furnaces off recently (when they were closing up shop) the Hum stopped. People had no idea what the noise could be until the factory closed.
Edit: also a little fun fact; Zug Island (where the factory was located) was mentioned in Robocop and was also the destination of the SS Edmond Fitzgerald before it sank.
#26
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon have long been a mystery, since no archaeological evidence was ever found for any such garden in Babylon. King Nebuchadnezzar, who many associate with the gardens, was not known to have enacted any major works of engineering, which would have been necessary to water the gardens. Many have suspected that they may never have existed at all.
A popular modern theory is that the gardens weren't Babylonian, but actually Assyrian. The Assyrian king Sennacherib was well known for his waterworks and aqueducts, and his palace in Nineveh was documented to have lavish gardens.
It's believed that people mistakenly attributed the gardens to Babylon. The name Babylon means "Gate of the Gods", and was used to describe several cities in Mesopotamia. Nineveh's gates were named after different gods by Sennacherib, so it would likely have been referenced that way.
Archaeology at the site of Nineveh has been difficult in recent years because it's very close to Mosul, Iraq. The region had been occupied by ISIS, who intentionally damaged parts of the site.
#27
All the Bigfoot tracks turned out to be some guy who made special shoes and just left them everywhere to [mess] with people.
#28
The Pioneer gravity anomaly.
Space probe wasn't accelerating away from Earth the way we'd predicted, but it didn't get noticed until the probe got way the hell out there.
Next space probe gets launched, gets way out there, same thing happens. WTH? How does acceleration not work right? Does gravity just change really far away?
Turns out the heat from the radioactive death generator was all coming off the same side of the space probe, and the extra particle radiation gave a "thermal recoil force" resulting in an extra acceleration of -- no kidding -- about 0.000000000874 m/s2.
Over enough distance, it all counts.
#29
The French guy who claimed to be a missing boy in the 90s, he even lived with the crazy mother.
Nicholas Barclay, aged 13 at the time he went missing, was last seen playing basketball with his friends in his home town of San Antonio, Texas, on 13 June 1994. Barclay never made it home and has not been seen or heard from since. In 1997, Bourdin took Barclay's identity and was flown to the United States. Although Bourdin had brown eyes and a French accent, he convinced the family he was their blue-eyed son, saying he had escaped from a child [abuse] ring and the ring had altered his eye color. Bourdin lived with the family for almost five months until 6 March 1998.
The craziest part is they recently found out the brother was the m******r and mu*****d Barclay with permission of his mother, and the only reason the French guy got away with it is because the family didn't want to reveal that they knew who [unalived] Barclay.
Just a boring person 18 hours ago
But why? Why did the brother have permission to mur-der his brother?
#30
So, in the early 2000s, someone posted new wave music that had been initially recorded off a German radio station on cassette around 1985. It contained about a minute of a song that became known as "Stay, the Second Time Around”, that no one seemed to be able to find any more information about. This became a pretty famous "earworm" internet mystery, until 2013 when folks on Reddit discovered the actual song and artist. It turned out it was a song by Swedish artist Johan Lindell titled "Up On The Roof" that never became any kind of hit, and up until that time, had never been re-released after the original analog release.
#31
The story of the Toynbee tiles always fascinated me, in the 1980s all these tiles started to appear in major cities across the US, mostly around Philadelphia. They were laid in the ground, in the middle of the streets and no-one knew how they appeared there. They had strange messages - “Toynbee idea in Kubrick’s 2001 resurrect dead on planet Jupiter”
There’s an amazing documentary about this guy who noticed the tiles and went on a quest to figure out how they were appearing and who was creating them. The tiles are actually IN the asphalt, which is not an easy feat. In the doc Justin Duer finds the guy and figures out how he does it- with a car that has no passenger seat and a hole in the bottom. It’s a beautifully heartbreaking story and I highly recommend watching it!
#32
The tomb of Jesus' previously unknown brother turned out to be a hoax to try to sell the tomb of a nobody for a lot of money.
#33
Another science mystery: Back in the 1800s, evolution theorists had predicted the age of the Earth to be several milliard years, since this would have been necessary for the current life forms to have evolved. But Kelvin, the number one superstar of physics at the time, had used thermodynamics to calculate the age of the Earth based on the temperature of its insides, and he said it was quite a bit younger. This was a mystery for many years, and was considered one of the major flaws of then-current evolution theory.
It was not until the early 1900s they found the answer: Radioactivity! Decays of uranium and other radioactive elements are heating up the Earth, so the cooling takes longer than expected. The biologists were right all along!
But when the scientists who made the discovery were about to present their findings, who's sitting at the back of the lecture room? It's Kelvin! Now an old man, he's still alive and has come to watch their presentation. They were terrified at the idea of having to stand in front of the Lord of Physics himself and basically explain why he was wrong. But to their great relief, he immediately fell asleep.
I think about this when I myself fall asleep in physics class. It happens to the best of us.
#34
Catching criminals like Bundy, Gacy, and Dahmer. Lots of people talk about how horrific and disgusting their crimes were and they forget that these monsters were caught. Granted, oftentimes not due to ace detective work by three letter agencies, but by regular people catching them on something mundane.
Bundy was caught after he was stopped by local police for speeding and the officer found him in a stolen vehicle. Gacy was caught after he was spotted on surveillance footage. Dahmer was found out after he solicited a potential victim who then flagged down local police officers. Hell, even Robert Pickton was caught by Canadian police after his property was raided for the suspected possession of illegal firearms.
RajunCajun 7 hours ago
Joe Metheny, the cannibal serial killer who turned m****r into a culinary nightmare. In the 1990s, Metheny ran a roadside BBQ stand in Baltimore, Maryland, serving up burgers that had an unthinkable secret ingredient—his victims. Blending human flesh with pork,
#35
The Sailing Stones of Death Valley.
**TL;DR:** Rocks would magically move up to 1,500 feet in the desert. Turns out it gets cold & freezes the ground overnight & the rocks would get pushed by the ice sheets that melted under the wind.
#36
The McStay family disappearance and m**ders. In February of 2010, the McStay’s, a family of 4 (Mom Summer, Dad Joseph, and sons Gianni and Joseph jr) seemingly vanished from their home- abruptly. A carton of eggs was left open on the counter and the family dogs were still outside in the backyard. The scene was eerie, and complicated because the home the McStays lived in was in the process of being renovated- so a “neat and orderly” home wasn’t the norm at this stage. It appeared there was missing furniture and the usual mess that comes with construction (some freshly painted or redone surfaces mixed with older versions).
From the outside- it appeared the family just took off. Neighbor had surveillance that captured what appeared to be the bottom of the family SUV leaving the driveway. Since they were living in California, the boarder to Mexico wasn’t far and authorities found footage of what appeared to be the McStay’s walking into Mexico with their two little boys in tow. The family SUV was found abandoned in a mall parking lot near the Mexico boarder.
3 years passed before the bodies of the McStay’s were found buried in shallow graves in the California desert. The bodies appeared to be in advanced decomposition and there were signs of blunt force trauma. A sledgehammer was also found buried with one of the bodies.
Chase Merritt, a business partner to Joseph McStay, was arrested and charged with their murders on 11/5/2014. His trial was delayed for years until 2019. He was sentenced to death. Motive- Chase had a gambling a*******n and had been and continued embezzling money from the business. His DNA was found in the McStay’s abandoned vehicle. He bludgeoned this beautiful family to death for money.
#37
The Case of Adrienne Shelly - screenwriter for Waitress. Husband came home to find her hanging in the shower - ruled s*****e.
He insists she was happy and would never [take her own life] promoting another view of crime scene where they found a shoe print that matched a construction worker in the building.
Sure enough the construction worker went to rob her and thought he [unalived] her so staged a s*****e when the hanging ended up being the actual thing that [ended] her.
#38
Human spontaneous combustion - not a real thing, it’s where there was an overlooked source of ignition, then subcutaneous fat is absorbed into clothing and acts like a wick - basically they’re a human candle.
clumsyc:
I remember a lot of OG Unsolved Mysteries episodes about spontaneous combustion. I thought it was a real concern as a kid.
Toujin C'Thlu 16 hours ago
The idea of spontaneous combustion scared the c**p out of me as a kid. Especially since I was particularly afraid of fire
#39
Sarah Yarborough was a teenager a few doors down who watched over us on several occasions when we were young kids. She was [unalived] and dumped in a bush at the high school like a piece of trash, and it was absolutely devastating. It wasn't a small town, but when it happens to your neighbor, it is very much in your sphere of awareness
Everyone was scared. I remember the media circus at the home, the eventual tapering off of said circus, and the family moving away to get away from the undoubtedly bad memories and constant reminders their kid was [unalived] and the criminal was still out there and on the loose.
It turned into a cold case.
Every now and then, I looked for news of an update even though I grew up and moved away. I did this for years, decades even, because it always bothered me as an early childhood memory. A couple years ago, I finally saw a local news report that DNA evidence and genealogy databases led to the arrest of the criminal. For me, that was an emotional moment of getting closure and I can't imagine the magnitude of emotions and fresh wounds felt by the parents having learned that nearly 30 years later, the investigation on the cold case paid off.
Liliana Spiro 17 hours ago
Patrick Nicholas was arrested for the crime in 2019 and was sentenced in 2023, is what I found looking the case up.
#40
Lori Erica Ruff committed s*****e after her husband left her. While going through her effects he found that she had been using a fake identity. No one could find her true identity for years until just recently.
#41
Atlantis isn’t real. The story is an allegory in Plato’s works that fit right within Greek sensibilities and interests, incorporating things the Greeks would’ve known about intimately and with interest, like authors are want to do. He also just made stuff up that was never there.
There ARE lost cities and structures in the ocean, but they are not Atlantis. There is this weird notion that ancient people were stupid, and this leads to a kind of literal interpretation and broad, reductive generalizing of their beliefs that are clearly, provably false, but exist nonetheless. Ancient people knew what metaphors and other artistic techniques are, and it actively harms progress to be reductive about the past and dishonest in the present.
#42
Dyatlov Pass incident - 9 experienced Russian hikers were found in all sorts of manners of death after finding their tents cut open and bodies found fleeing from the campsite.
>After the group's bodies were discovered, an investigation by Soviet authorities determined that six had died from hypothermia while the other three had been [unaived] by physical trauma. One victim had major skull damage, two had severe chest trauma, and another had a small crack in the skull. Four of the bodies were found lying in running water in a creek, and three of these had soft tissue damage of the head and face – two of the bodies were missing their eyes, one was missing its tongue, and one was missing its eyebrows. The investigation concluded that a "compelling natural force" had caused the deaths. Numerous theories have been put forward to account for the unexplained deaths, including animal attacks, hypothermia, avalanche, katabatic winds, infrasound -induced panic, military involvement, or some combination of these.
But in 2020, a Russian findings report came out and concluded that an avalanche was the COD.
T'Mar of Vulcan 6 hours ago
Basically a combination of factors. The ones missing body parts had been predated by animals. Etc.
#43
The Kensington rock. Found by an american farmer in like late 1800s?? Maybe? Covered in old Norse runes, which were claimed to be from around the year 1000, which would ”prove” that there were white settlers in America long before Colombus, thereby justifying a lot of the white supremacist claims of the 20th century.
Later PROVED to have been forged by a swedish settler, just for fun, some hundred years prior. And people are still making documentaries on it, claiming it to be some wild unrevealed truth of america’s colonization.
WhyamIhere? 18 hours ago
That Swede's got style, but I don't think the Norse would've gone that far south anyway
#44
Disappearance of Corrie McKeague.
This one is strange.. A guy is out drinking with friends late at night and leaves. He starts wandering the streets, and a CCTV sees him enter a cull de sac, then he's never seen again.
Some think there is foul play, since an accidental death would at least result in a body.
But then family and friends reveal that he had a very strange habit of sleeping in garbage bins when he was drunk.
A few hours after he entered the cul de sac, the garbage truck came and picked up the bins. Later, after looking at the logs, it turns out that one bin weighed several hundred pounds more than it should have. But that was only recognized after it was too late.
Liliana Spiro 16 hours ago
I miss 10 seconds ago, when I wasn't familiar with this story... What a gruesome de*th
#45
Why socks tend to "vanish."
A study showed that, because of their material and shape (a flattened "tube") they can hold a very large static electrical charge for their weight (most often acquired from tumble drying).
This charge makes them stick to all sorts of objects --and people's clothing-- where they can be transported to different places unnoticed. And because they are "boomerang"-shaped, with one heavy end, they soon work themselves free via pendulum motion. Then, again because of their flatness and weighted-at-one-end shape, they can easily slip into the cracks between objects when they drop.
Also: Cats and dogs love their weird combination of cleaned stink, and often steal these fallen socks.
#46
What is the structure of the atom and how does matter behave as they do- heat, electricity and a bunch of other cool stuff. Quantum mechanics will appear to be a case of extreme mental gymnastics to explain things...But it is the foundation of all the technological development and progress that we have had in the last 100 years or so...
Jeff White 3 hours ago
It really gets to get weird when you (finally) begin to (barely) understand the Schrödinger's Wave Equations. You start to see that matter is really waves. Then your head explodes and you make a vow never to think of that S^&t again (after you pass the class).
#47
The Erebus and the Terror were found a few years ago. The two ships were part of an artic expedition and dissapeared 150 years ago.
#48
Devil's Kettle Falls: A stream separates into two sections, one continues normally the other spirals deep into a hole. All sorts of things were thrown down the hole in an effort to discover where the water went. Ping pong balls, various dyes, it was even rumored that someone stuck an old car down there. Eventually someone came up with a clever idea, they measured the total water flow above and below the falls and discovered they were similar enough to deduce the two streams join back up relatively quickly.
#49
When surveying a bay in Alaska from the air in the 1950's the geologists on board noticed that the tree line was different several hundred feet above sea level.
Almost as if a tsunami had washed the trees away at one point. Problem was a tsunami of this size had never been recorded or though possible.
Only a few years later a rock slide occurred in that same bay causing a 1700 ft wave.
Edit. The 1720 feet was measured on land that was the highest point the wave hit. On the bay the wave would not have been this high.
#50
The location of Forrest Fenn’s treasure, the eccentric antiquities dealer(grave robber?) hid a box of valuables worth a million dollars in the Rockies. He released a poem in an autobiography that contained clues to its location. I believe it stayed hidden for over ten years until it was located in 2020. I have always wanted to vacation out in the Rocky Mountains/Yellowstone area and looking for the treasure was a big part of what I wanted to do while I was there.
#51
The nightstalker. The citizens actually captured him from a picture in the newspaper. I think he was "held" by the neighbors until cops arrived. He held LA in probably it's most fear of all time. No rules, no selection pattern and his destruction was as vulgar as it gets. His capture is an awesome story.
Lady Eowyn 5 hours ago
There isn't even enough information here to go searching for more information.
#52
Something a little close to home. My friend Jacob Wetterling was 11 when he was kidnapped in 1989. They finally found his body in 2016 and solved the crime.
Brendon Nash 1 hour ago
I knew his parents while I lived in Minnesota. Glad there was finally closure.
#53
How genetic information is passed on to offspring. If you read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species he basically predicts that there must be some physiological method for genetic code to be passed down, then DNA was discovered like 100 years later.
TotallyNOTAFox 4 hours ago
Interestingly we have two DNA sets in our bodies - The nucleus contains our own while the mitochondria have a copy of the DNA of our mothers in them. (The ovum needs mitochondria to survive and replicates them when fertilized)
#54
Don’t know whether John Franklin’s lost expedition counts because it was technically already solved for many years, but at the time British society straight up dismissed the reports of cannibalism, and for many years officials did not listen to the local Inuit who knew where it was all along. The lead poisoning, however, is a recent discovery.
#55
Christine Jessop christine was a nine-year-old Canadian girl from Queensville, Ontario who was abducted, [used], and [unalived] in October 1984. Her body was found about 50 kilometres (31 mi) from her home, in Durham Region on New Year's Eve of the same year.
On October 15, 2020, police officials announced that using a new technique for tracing criminals through the DNA of their relatives they had concluded Jessop was [unaived] by Calvin Hoover.
#56
That the Lusitania did indeed have munitions on board when she was sunk in 1915 by a German U Boat, making her a legitimate military target.
The British government always insisted she was just a passenger liner and denied there were any munitions on board however in 1982, the head of the Foreign Office's American department finally admitted that, "although no weapons were shipped, there is a large amount of ammunition in the wreck, some of which is highly dangerous and poses a safety risk to salvage teams"
#57
One that’s being talked about lately: the Kristin Smart case. Don’t get it confused with the Elizabeth Smart case (taken from her room, held hostage for nine months).
Kirstin Smart went missing in 1996 after a college party at California Polytechnic State University. The last person to see her alive was Paul Flores, who has walked with her back from the party. She had just met him that night. He has been a suspect for the past 25 years, but there was never enough evidence to charge him.
On April 13, 2021, Paul Flores was arrested for m****r and his dad, Ruben Flores (now 80 years old) was arrested for helping conceal the body. They both pleaded not guilty. A body has not been found (yet) but the police have substantial evidence to believe that Paul Flores did [unalive] Kristin Smart. The police also believe that there have been more victims, and there have been dozens of new reports since Paul’s arrest.
Liliana Spiro 16 hours ago
I looked up this case to see if there were any updates that would actually make this a resolved case. Paul Flores was indeed found guilty in October of 2022 and is serving 25 to life. He won't be eligible for parole until at least 2047. His father, Ruben Flores, was found not guilty of accessory after the fact.
#58
Delphi m**ders. I thought they’d be unsolved forever. So glad they got him, even more so that he’s literally admitted to it now.
Lady Eowyn 5 hours ago
The murders of Abigail Williams and Liberty German, also known as the Delphi murders, occurred on February 13, 2017, in Delphi, Indiana, United States. Their bodies were discovered near the Monon High Bridge Trail, part of the Delphi Historic Trails, from where the girls disappeared the previous day. The murders received extensive media coverage, in part due to video and audio recordings released by law enforcement that came from German's smartphone, which recorded an individual believed to be the killer.[4][5][6] The case remained unresolved for five years until 2022 when Richard M. Allen was arrested and charged with the murders.[7] He was found guilty in 2024 and sentenced to 130 years in prison.[8][9]
#59
My missing passport: while in Mexico in 1998 I lost my passport about a week before I was supposed to leave. I didn't have much with me and searched for days. I took everything out of my bags several times (I was sure I left it in my suitcase). Ultimately I had to leave without it after calling the university I was attending who helped me contact the embassy.
Years later I found the passport in the suitcase I had searched a half dozen times looking for the passport. I had even used that suitcase many times since Mexico. The passport had gotten under the lining (buttoned down with metal studs) and then worked it's way partiality back out again.
#60
Geedis and the Land of Ta. A few years ago (2017) comedian Nate Fernald posted a tweet of an enamel pin he had bought of a familiar looking friendly monster with the word Geedis written under it. He was unable to find any information on what Geedis is and the mystery took the internet by storm. The mystery kept growing as someone found a sticker of Geedis alongside other characters all listed as The Land of Ta. The sticker sheet was from a company called Dennison. There were no Google results at all for either Geedis or The Land of Ta. With multiple people researching that was where the mystery was left off and people kind of forgot about it.
But a couple years later it was solved. A podcast was made where they investigated the mystery, got a hold of the former art director of Dennison back in the 80s who referred them to a few potential artists and they found the daughter of one of the artists who had passed away and in her father's stuff was the original pencil drawings of the creaturs of The Land of Ta. It was never anything but those stickers. This internet mystery still appeared on lists for awhile as unsolved.
The only mystery left is who made the enamel pins, which is still a mystery but not quite as big as "who is this character and this land that seems familiar but that there's no record of?".
Lynchamigsakta 3 hours ago
Oh I listened to this pod, it really was surprisingly exciting and interesting. Definitely worth a listen if you like podcasts
#61
The strange orbital paths of planets in the outer parts of the solar system.
Conclusion: Pluto.
David Paterson 15 hours ago
Um no. It's a lot weirder than that but does count as a solved mystery. Tomburgh discovered Pluto in the correct place to explain the orbital anomalies of the outer planets, but it was nowhere near massive enough. The mystery remained until the Voyager mission trajectory data was studied. The results showed that the masses of all four of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune had previously been measured incorrectly. Not by much, by a few tenths of 1%. When the corrected masses were input into the Solar System model, voila, no more orbital anomalies of planets in the outer solar system.
#62
The true identity of "Benjamin Kyle", the guy who had amnesia after being found unconscious in a Burger King dumpster. Genetic research discovered his real name was William Burgess Powell.
His story is still pretty crazy as it was discovered that at some point in his life he had abandoned his family and all of his possessions to live on his own. And there are still no official records of him for the 20 years prior to him being discovered in the dumpster.
#63
Somerton Man - for years people created conspiracy theories. They found that note in his jacket and thought he was a spy. Thought he’d been [unalived] on a mission. They dug him up a while back and it turns out he was just an ordinary guy and his family still lived in the area.
#65
Lyle Stevik.
He was Doe case of a man who hanged himself in a motel in Amanda Park, Washington in September 2001. He signed into the hotel under the name "Lyle Stevik," not his real name, and he was found dead in his room, hanged in the closet, with money left for the room and a note that just said "s*****e." No other identifiable information was found on him.
Police investigations at the time did not produce any results.
He was only identified in 2018 via DNA analysis, but his family chose not to reveal his true identity.
#66
Quite a recent mystery, but there were screenshots of a The Big Comfy Couch video game circulating that had people confused, namely as one of the screenshots showed not just combat against the dust bunnies, but what appeared to be blood splatters--which is kind of antithetical to a kid's show like The Big Comfy Couch.
After a bit of poking around, it turned out that one of the developers found out that people were circulating that mystery, and confirmed the game was not only legitimate, but the reason for the blood splatters was that the game was built off of an action game's engine that had blood splatter abilities enabled by default, and he just forgot to turn it off (he also jovially referred to it as "grape juice"). He also ended up showing two other games that ran off that same engine, and one of those was honestly probably more interesting than The Big Comfy Couch game--it was a massive Capcom crossover.
LSuperSonicQ has a good pair of videos on the ordeal, it's pretty interesting.
#67
The Mary Celeste was a cargo ship (with sails) that was found deserted in the water but nothing on board seemed odd otherwise. It is believed that the alcohol on board leaked, and fearing an explosion, the crew got in a life boat and ran a line from the life boat to ship so they could get back to it if there was no issues, but stay a safe distance away just in case. The line broke, and the crew did not survive in open seas in a life boat.
What do you think ?
Roxy222uk 5 minutes ago
I was a child when it was announced that the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs had been discovered and verified (as much as possible). Also, in books about dinosaurs when I was kid all the sauropods were depicted standing in lakes because ‘their body weight was too much for their legs to support’. Anyone else remember that?
Roxy222uk 5 minutes ago
I was a child when it was announced that the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs had been discovered and verified (as much as possible). Also, in books about dinosaurs when I was kid all the sauropods were depicted standing in lakes because ‘their body weight was too much for their legs to support’. Anyone else remember that?
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