I love a good unsolved mystery as much as the next guy. But what I increasingly don’t love is reading about murders, kidnappings, and abused kids. It seems most of the collections of unsolved mysteries on the internet are filled with gruesome murders, disappearances where the person was almost certainly murdered, and abducted kids. If I never see that photo of the two kids in the van again, that would be fine by me.
So, what are some of your favorite unsolved mysteries that aren’t horrible to read about? The Dan “D.B.” Cooper story is an example of the kind of thing I’m looking for. Sure, Cooper committed a crime and I’m sure the ordeal was terrifying for the other people on board the plane. But he didn’t kill anyone other than (probably) himself. Speculating on who he was and what happened to him is good fun. I listened to a good book about that case a while back. Fascinating.
I’m not necessarily looking only for crimes. The Toynbee tiles are another good mystery. I just glanced at the Wiki article on them. It looks like there are some good candidates for the creator, but no one has been positively identified. I guess placing the tiles is vandalism, but it seems pretty harmless, if bizarre.
That’s not really mysterious. I mean, we don’t have documentary style footage or anything, but the name of a local tribe (Croatoan) was carved into a fence post, and the Croatoan eventually showed up with European looking members.
I’m going to guess that they abandoned their failed colony and shacked up with the locals.
I get suckered in every time they have a special on the Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine in Arizona. There are some gruesome fates associated with it, but essentially the mystery involves the cryptic treasure map and the clues.
I’ve always been fascinated with the Chicago Max Headroom incident on WGN in Chicago. I remember hearing about it when it happened and it has stuck with me ever since. I remember someone here posted a possible explanation of who did it.
Of these three, I think the Valentine’s Day Monopole is the most interesting. The other two are of fundamentally mundane forms (a radio pulse and a high-energy proton); they’re mysterious only in that there’s no known source that can account for their energy and source direction. Monopoles, however, are not generally believed to exist at all (or alternately, if they do exist, their quantity may be as low as zero), so the VDM would be remarkable even if its source were known.
There are four possible explanations:
1: It’s a real monopole, and we were either extremely lucky that we saw even one, or extremely unlucky that we haven’t seen more.
2: It’s a real physical process for which there are inherent reasons for why it would look exactly like a monopole, but it isn’t an actual monopole.
3: It’s a real physical process that could have appeared to have any properties, but it just happened to look exactly like a monopole.
4: It’s a hoax, by someone tampering with the equipment to deliberately look like a monopole.
Of these, I favor explanation 2, followed by 4, 3, and 1, in that order. Most models for monopoles and cosmology predict that we should either be swimming in the things (counter to the lack of other detections), or there should be only on order of one in the entire visible Universe (in which case it beggars belief that we saw it). And if it’s a hoax, nobody has yet admitted it, over three decades later. But of course, even if it is some relatively-mundane physical process that mimics monopoles, we still don’t know what that process would be, so it’s still a mystery.
Thanks for the XKCD link that brought me to the Lead Masks Case, once of the few mysteries included that I had never heard of. I’ll be doing some more reading about it now.
The Dyatlov Pass Incident is one of my favorites, but I didn’t mention it because while it’s fascinating, it’s definitely nightmare fuel.
The working theory in the (tiny) community is that it’s someone who has become quite famous or notable and cannot risk admitting the prank without severe consequences. I’ve had feelers out for ten years and gotten only FOAF legends.
It was almost certainly someone with a college education in broadcasting or commercial radio/TV technology, and it’s not hard to imagine that they’re now a known face or major figure in, say, a network’s technical operations. If they were basically a nobody or a run of the mill tech or prankster, they would have gone public after 20 years or so.
I’m more fascinated that at least three people were involved, and not one of them has spilled the beans.
We might find out after he retires safely, in perhaps another ten years.
If you feel like going historical, there’s Richard III and whether he killed the Princes in the Tower. Lots of fascinating writing about it, but much of it (on both sides) is interwoven with really shoddy scholarship and sometimes downright dishonesty (leaving out key facts that don’t suit their theory). To my knowledge, there isn’t one reliable, just-the-facts core text; if you want to get a clear picture on that one, you need to read a bunch of stuff written from various angles.