People sometimes talk about that eureka moment when something occurs to them, and a great discovery is made. And it’s called a moment because it seems like it happens instantly. But if you spend years working on something before that moment, did it really happen instantly? Or was it a discovery years in the making? History is full of examples of discoveries that took an incredibly long time, some might argue too long, to make. In some cases these discoveries took decades.
10. The Mystery of Bobby Dunbar
Bobby Dunbar disappeared in the summer of 1912 when he was just four-years-old. His family had gone camping in Louisiana and the boy wandered off in the night sometime. At first it was assumed he’d drowned in the lake, but his hat was later found much further away. Suddenly, the idea that he had been kidnapped came to mind. What started as a tragic tale soon became more and more bizarre.
Nearly a year later, a drifter traveling with a young boy in Mississippi was arrested. The boy was about Bobby’s age and the man’s story made no sense. He said he’d been traveling with the boy for a year but his mother, Julia Anderson, had given permission. Anderson agreed, but she said it had just been for a few days. The Dunbar family went to see the boy and accounts of whether the boy recognized them vary. But finally, Mrs. Dunbar identified the boy as Bobby based on some moles and a court agreed. The Dunbars took custody of the boy and returned home.
Suspicious that things were hinky, a newspaper paid to bring Anderson to town. She was shown Bobby and four other boys of the same age. She couldn’t identify the one that was supposedly her son and none recognized her. The next day she was able to identify him but by then it was too late. She went home alone.
Bobby Dunbar was raised by his parents, became a man, had a family of his own, and died in 1966. Years later, the granddaughters of Dunbar and Anderson met up to put the story to rest. Through DNA testing they were able to confirm Bobby Dunbar was not actually Bobby Dunbar at all. He really had been the son of Julia Anderson and the real Bobby Dunbar had never been found.
9. A Missing Ring Turned Up After 47 Years
Losing a ring is not all that uncommon an event. People probably lose jewelry all the time, and it has to be upsetting in the moment but you eventually get over it. Debra McKenna no doubt got over losing her class ring in a Maine department store back in 1973 when she’d taken it off to wash her hands and forgotten about it by mistake. Since it was just a class ring and not something like an engagement ring, though the man she eventually married gave it to her, she probably never thought about it again until 2020.
The ring showed up in the mail in 2020 after it was found by a man named Marko Saarinen. Saarinen didn’t find it in that department store, however. Nor did he find it in Maine. He was using a metal detector in a forest near a town called Kaarina in southwest Finland.
The man read the inscription, SM, and looked up the school’s alumni association. They tracked down the owner, and his wife, and got the ring back to its rightful owner.
8. The Greatest Ball Game of All-Time
The 1960 World Series between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the New York Yankees has been called the greatest world series of all-time. The Yankees were seen as the dominant powerhouse team but the Pirates took them all the way to game seven when Bill Mazeroski of the Pirates hit a game winning home run in the 9th inning to take the series. It was the first time a series had been won with a home run; it was an incredible upset and it was down to the wire. It was everything sports fans love. And it seemed like it was lost.
For years there were no tapes whatsoever of that final game. VCRs didn’t exist in 1960 so fans were not recording it at home. TV stations reused tapes back in the day so all old games from before the 1970s had been erased. Fortunately, no one had accounted for how big of a baseball fan Bing Crosby was.
Crosby, who was part owner of the Pirates, was afraid to watch the game live. He thought he’d jinx their chances. Instead, he went to Europe and had the game recorded so he could watch it later. Then he stored the tape in his wine cellar where the precise temperature and humidity perfectly preserved it until 2010 when it was discovered again. The game was restored and transferred to DVD and can now be watched by fans once more.
7. The De-Extinction of the Lord Howe Stick Insect
Species go extinct at an alarming rate with some estimates saying a few dozen species vanish every day. One of the species we came to terms with losing in 1983 was the Lord Howe Island stick insect.That was when it was officially declared extinct, though no one had seen one since about 1920.
The bugs were discovered in 1918 with a shipwreck on the very tiny, mostly desolate island. Rats from the ship are believed to have invaded and eventually killed off the native insect population and that, as they say, was that.
Despite their apparent extinction, in 2001 some of the insects were rediscovered on a tiny little volcanic outcropping called Ball’s Pyramid, 23 km off the coast of the main island. The island has barely any vegetation on it at all but what it does have turned out to be a habitat for the bugs. They identified just 24 of the bugs.
One breeding pair was rescued and taken to Australia. From them, 13,000 eggs were harvested and now a breeding program has been set up in zoos around the world.
6. Glass Sponge Reefs
The world below the waves is still a mystery and every day we discover new creatures that live in the ocean’s depths. By that same token, we lose many species as well. One thing we thought was long since dead is the glass sponge. These sponges are known to build reefs, growing up to nearly 46 centimeters tall, and the reefs they create become habitats for all kinds of fish and other marine species. They use silica dissolved in the sea water to build delicate skeleton-like structures, which is where the glass name comes from.
Obviously this is a good thing for the ecosystem and the sponges are a species worthy of protection. That’s ironic, of course, because up until recently they were thought to be extinct. And not just a little extinct, either. It was believed they had died off about 100 million years ago. Their remains, called mummies, are well known and a 2,900-kilometer reef of ancient glass sponges stretches from Spain to Romania.
In 1987, off the coast of BC in Canada, new reefs of living glass sponges were discovered, proving the ancient species had not vanished as once thought, they were just deeper than anyone expected them to be.
5. Randy Bachman’s Missing Guitar
Randy Bachman was famous for his work in ’70s rock bands Bachman Turner Overdrive and The Guess Who. His most famous songs include “Takin’ Care of Business” and “American Woman.” He wrote that last one on a 1957 Gretsch guitar that he’d bought as a teen and was basically his signature instrument. He learned how to play guitar using it and he played it all the time. Until 1977 when someone stole it from a hotel room.
Bachman said he was remarkably possessive of the instrument. He slept with it and he chained it to hotel toilets so no one could steal it. But it was the day that his road manager took it, just long enough to check out of their hotel and then pick up the band, that someone managed to steal it for real.
For decades Bachman lamented the loss and was hopeful he’d find it again one day. In 2020, a fan named William Long who’d heard about the loss in a YouTube video figured he could help out with his own skills as an investigator. Remarkably, after learning the guitar inside and out and scouring the internet for images, Long discovered the guitar in Japan where a musician named Takeshi had bought it in 2016. He had no idea it had been stolen but agreed to trade Bachman for another one.
In the summer of 2022 at the Canadian embassy in Japan, Bachman met with Takeshi and traded him another guitar for the stolen one. He went out of his way to find a nearly identical guitar, in fact, made the same week and with a nearly identical serial number.
4. A Car Discovered After 20 Years
Imagine how frustrated and angry you’d feel if you discovered someone had stolen your car. That happened in 1997 to a man in Frankfurt, Germany. He parked in a garage, went about his day and came back to find the car missing. Twenty years went by and then the garage was set to be torn down but the owners had one small snag – there was a car parked in it still. It was that man’s car.
Turns out the man had forgotten where he parked. For 20 years his car hadn’t moved at all, and so he discovered it exactly where he’d left it all those years ago. By that time it was rusted out and immobile, but definitely not stolen.
3. The Glowing Wounds of Civil War Soldiers
A lot of crazy things can happen in war but you rarely expect to hear about wounds glowing blue and healing faster than normal, at least not outside of science fiction. But that happened at the Civil War Battle of Shiloh and for years it remained a mystery.
The massive battle saw 40,000 Confederate soldiers square off against the Union with as many as 16,000 casualties. As The wounded waited up to two days in the mud for treatment,some began to glow blue at night. It was noted that those who did glow had a better survival rate.
It wasn’t until 2001 that a non-supernatural explanation was discovered. A bioluminescent bacterium called Photorhabdus luminescens that lives in soil, which inhibits pathogen growth by secreting an antibiotic compound, could have been growing in the wounds and inadvertently saving the lives of the soldiers.
2. Twins Accidentally Swapped at Birth
About 1 in 250 natural pregnancies results in twins. Fraternal twins are more common than identical twins and about two-thirds of those pregnant with twins will have fraternal twins. So there’s not necessarily any reason to be shocked if you have twins and they don’t look alike. Certainly, in 1974 in the Canary Islands when twins Begona and Delia were born, their mother wouldn’t have been suspicious.
It would be 28 years before anyone realized that there was a third baby at the hospital that day. A girl named Beatriz was accidentally swapped for Delia and the two sisters, who were identical, were now believed to just be fraternal since of course Beatriz didn’t look like her sister.
The women only found out when a friend of one of the twins met the other, got confused, and arranged a meeting. A DNA test soon followed, and the twins realized the truth of what happened. Despite that, they were reluctant to share the news. Their biological mother learned first but the mother who raised Delia wasn’t told for almost 9 years. She didn’t take it well.
1. Relocating Bouvet Island
You may have heard that buying land is a good investment because no one makes it any more. That’s mostly true, but it doesn’t mean you can still discover land every once in a while. Sometimes it just gets lost and needs to be re-found, which is what happened to Bouvet Island.
Bouvet Island is the most remote place in the world and 1,750 kilometers from Antarctica, its closest neighbor, and an island no one would or should ever want to visit. It was discovered in 1739 and consists of rock and ice and a handful of penguins. Plus it’s where Alien vs Predator was set. Explorer Jean-Baptiste Bouvet de Lozier discovered it on an Antarctic exploration mission and then promptly mislabelled it on a map such that it went missing again for another 69 years because no one knew how to find it.
When it finally was rediscovered, it was hundreds of kilometers from where Bouvet had recorded it so no one was even sure if it was the same place. It wasn’t until 1898 when it finally had a fixed location on maps.