There’s no dearth of stories of the Internet being used for malintent. From scammers out to take your money to online harassment to those dark parts of the web we don’t speak of here, the worst of Internet somehow perfectly coincides with the worst of humanity.

SEE ALSO: 10 Ways The Internet Is Destroying You

On rare occasions, though, the Internet can be used for good, too, as many of these online crime solvers have proven. They succeeded where professional crime agencies and police departments couldn’t, either due to good old incompetence or simply not having the crowdsourced tools only the Internet can muster.

10 Hit And Run

Catching someone after a hit-and-run used to be a pretty difficult task in the pre-Internet days, as there’s usually little evidence to go on in those cases. If you’re lucky (and still alive), the driver may leave some conclusive evidence behind. That may still not be enough, though, unless they outright drop their driving license or a swab full of their saliva at the scene.

We’re not saying that the Internet has improved conviction rates in hit-and-run cases, though we know of at least one instance where the culprit was caught because of the online community. It happened in Washington, where a cyclist was hit and killed by a collision, though the cops didn’t have a clue as to the perpetrator. The photo of the scene was eventually uploaded to Reddit, asking other people for help identifying vehicle parts.

While the poster likely just did it out of curiosity, things got serious when an ex state car inspector was able to pinpoint the precise make and model of the vehicle in question. Unfortunately for the man responsible, not many people in the area owned a mid-1980s Chevrolet Silverado at the time, which led to his arrest and eventual conviction.^[1]

9 Shaky Footage

America is by no means new to extra-judicial killings by cops, except that now – thanks to modern technology like cameras – it’s way more difficult to get away with it. That doesn’t mean that it still doesn’t happen, though they just have to make sure there’s no one around to witness or record it.

That realization, however, was lost on Michael Slager; a police officer in South Carolina convicted of shooting and killing an unarmed black man called Walter Scott. He wasn’t immediately charged, though, as the footage shot by witnesses at the scene was too shaky and inconclusive to get a conviction. That was, of course, until a Canadian student online saw the video and decided to stabilize it.

Daniel Voshart was studying cinematography focused on image stabilization at the time, and wanted to do something about what he perceived to be a racially-motivated crime. He worked on the video and posted it as a GIF on Reddit, which – apart from later proving to be conclusive evidence – mobilized the online community in support of the victim.^[2]

8 Pushed To Suicide

When the 18-year-old Nadia Kajouji committed suicide off a bridge on the Rideau River in Ottawa, her friends and family were justifiably devastated. She was going through a lot, including a previous miscarriage along with pressure at school. (Needless to say, if you or anyone around you is feeling the same way, please reach out to someone around you.)

As the story unfolded, though, it was soon discovered that she didn’t take the decision on her own. She had spoken to someone called Cami D (real name Melchert-Dinkel) on an online forum a few weeks before the suicide, who had convinced her to take the final step. His identity was later discovered by Celia Bay, an online counselor, who also discovered that he had been doing this for a while. All in all, he had convinced five or six people to commit suicide in the past, and was charged with one count of attempted assisting suicide and one of assisted suicide, thanks to Celia.^[3]

7 Rape

Debate around sexual assault on campus and jock culture has been raging on for a while, though the Steubenville High School case was one of the first few cases to happen in the age of social media. We’d spare you the horrific details of the crime, though as a summary, a minor was raped by a bunch of her peers in August, 2012. It happened over the course of the night and across locations on and off campus.

While the main perpetrators accused in the crime were later convicted, we often forget the role of the Internet in those convictions. Because of the local influence of the accused, the authorities were, at first, reluctant to take the case seriously. That was until Anonymous – a global and controversial – group of online hacker vigilantes posted a bulk of evidence online. Apart from forcing the authorities to reopen the case, it also brought the conversation to the national stage. It included confessions by the accused, photos and videos from the night and other incriminating material.^[4]

6 Stolen Laptop

Having something like your laptop or phone stolen is devastating news. It’s not about the monetary value of the thing – even if gadgets these days are admittedly quite expensive – but rather your personal information on it, as there’s usually no way to recover that. That was probably what was going through Sean Power’ mind when his Macbook Pro was stolen, along with his phone and some documents.

It wasn’t all bad, though, as he had a software on his laptop that alerted him of its whereabouts whenever it was online. He hadn’t lodged a police complaint or was in the city at the time, and did the only thing he could think of; ask his 12,000 Twitter followers to help. To his surprise, one of his followers managed to successfully retrieve the laptop, along with all the other documents in the bag.^[5]

5 Online Vigilantes Help Speed Up Minor Rape Case Proceedings

The alleged gang rape and eventual suicide of 17-year-old Rehtaeh Parsons in Canada made news around the world. Accounts differ on exactly what drove her to suicide, though many believe that the circulation of her photographs online and cyberbullying were the primary factors. While similar crimes have definitely happened before, the involvement of social media and the relatively-new phenomenon (at the time) of online harassment gave this one a tragically unique angle.

The cops had initially closed the case, as they found little to no evidence linking the gang rape to the suicide (despite there being literal photographic evidence of it). They had to reopen it due to mounting pressure from people online, especially from hackers affiliated with Anonymous. We maintain that any kind of vigilantism is bad – as the line between vigilantes and mobs is a rather thin one – though in this case, the hackers definitely made sure that the case doesn’t go cold.^[6]

4 Omni-Potent

As anyone who has truly gone to the absolute depths of the Internet (for research purposes, of course) would tell you, there really is some horrifying stuff out there. We’re not just talking about illegal drugs and bizarre kinks here, but real snuff movies, child pornography and hired killers. It’s a difficult place to police, too, as most of those corners are hidden behind the dark web and other elaborate privacy measures.

That didn’t sit too well with a hacker called Brad William, who decided to do something about it. Originally operating anonymously under his alias Omni-Potent, he designed a virus to infect over 3,000 computers of suspected child predators. While a lot of the evidence he ended up gathering was incriminating, the authorities never acted upon most of it, as it’s not admissible in court because of being obtained illegally.

That doesn’t mean that he didn’t help at all. His evidence did end up securing a few convictions and outing suspected child predators.^[7]

3 Grateful Doe

Anyone who grew up in or around Greensville County in Virginia would have heard of Grateful Doe. It was an unofficial name given to an unidentified victim of a car crash that killed two, as no one knew who he was for 20 years due to the extent of his injuries. All they had to go on was a tattoo on his arm, two tickets to a Grateful Dead concert and a note addressed to a certain Jason.

All of that changed when Grateful Dead fans online decided to make a page dedicated to identifying him, which drew quite a bit of attention to the otherwise closed case. Fortunately, one of the photographs posted there prompted a woman to contact the admin. As it turned out, the unidentified body was that of her son Jason Callahan who had gone missing around that time (they just assumed that he ran away from home), which was later confirmed by DNA tests.^[8]

2 Hate Crime

Social media is more often in the news for causing hate crimes than preventing them, especially in today’s polarized society. In many of those cases, it’s not possible to ascertain the identities of the assailants, as most of them happen in secluded parts of the city at night (if they’re smart about it, anyway).

So, when a couple of men were beaten up by a group of assailants in Philadelphia for their perceived sexuality back in 2014, it looked like it’d go down the same way as all of those other cases. Fortunately, the authorities decided to release the pictures to the public, and someone on Twitter was able to correctly identify them.^[9]

1 Murder

No matter how much we try to get people to not murder each other, it has been a part of human society for as long as one can remember. Even with our best technology, it’s quite difficult to solve all murder cases out there, as incriminating evidence is still quite hard to obtain. On the other hand, some murder cases get solved by the most unexpected people, like amateur detectives on the Internet.

Case in point; the murder of a certain homeless man in Florida named Abraham Shakespeare. While the police originally had no leads on the suspect, frequent visitors of the online crime-solving forums called Websleuths suspected a woman Shakespeare had transferred all of his previous lottery winnings to. Things got even more bizarre when the woman herself joined the discussion, and eventually confessed to the murder. The moderators made sure that none of her words were edited, which was enough for the cops to get a conviction.^[10]

About The Author: You can check out Himanshu’s stuff at Cracked (www.cracked.com/members/RudeRidingRomeo/) and Screen Rant (https://screenrant.com/author/hshar/), or get in touch with him for writing gigs ([email protected]).

Math is, understandably, a complicated subject to get a hang of. Most of us are simply not wired to do anything with a large amount of numbers, even if we’re intuitively mathematical beings. We’re adding, subtracting, multiplying and doing even more complicated equations in our heads all the time. It’s a problem, though, when that turns into complicated symbols and alien words like ‘derivatives’ as soon as it’s translated on paper.

See Also: 10 Simple But Costly Math Errors In History

While some mathematicians would simplify those complex equations for the layman, there are also those who do the complete opposite – apply a complicated equation to something simple for no discernible reason. A considerable amount of funding from legitimate – even government – sources has gone into finding out the math behind the simplest things in our everyday lives, even if we never – for once – asked for it.

From the mythical “Beer Goggles” effect to dripping teapots, here are 10 simple things scientists made unnecessarily complicated with math.

8The “Beer Goggles” Effect

We’ve always suspected that having more alcohol makes other people more attractive to you. In fact, many of us depend on it. There have never been any studies that confirm this, though most of us have always just assumed it to be the case from anecdotal experience.

Some researchers from St. Andrews University and Glasgow University in Scotland, though, weren’t satisfied with just that. They sought out to seek the ultimate formula for how alcohol affects attractiveness, and set up a study.

As they found, the formula consists of symbols we honestly do not have even the educational background to understand. As far as we can tell, it depends on a variety of factors, like how brightly lit the area is, the amount of smoke in the air, number of glasses you’ve had etc. It then calculates a “Beer Goggle” factor from 1 to 100, where at 1 you perceive everyone to be as attractive as you would sober, and 100 where you find everyone in the room to be at peak mating condition.

7 The Physics Of Biscuit Dunking

Biscuits maybe the British equivalent of cookies, but they occupy a more prominent role in British culture than their American counterparts. Tea and biscuits are one of Britain’s favorite snacks, especially during the more boring parts of a typical British day. That’s why all Brits are aware of the classic dunking method of having biscuits with tea. Most of them are good at dunking their biscuits, but only a few are serious about it.

Take this one British scientist, who wanted to perfect the science of biscuit dunking. He carried out an elaborate and in-depth study on all the factors that affect the dunk-ability of a biscuit, and it took him years to finish, too.

Many of his findings were surprising – even if completely unnecessary and unasked-for – like the fact that a gingernut biscuit should be dunked for 3 seconds, while a digestive biscuit could be dunk for up to 8 seconds.

6 How To Hold A Hamburger

Despite being around hamburgers for so long, most of us are bad at eating them without making a mess. There’s really nothing we can do to change that without fundamentally altering what makes them so good. Moreover, most people don’t care either way.

Some researchers appearing on a Japanese TV show, though, claimed to have found the perfect way to hold a hamburger without spilling anything. They came to that conclusion after months of complex calculations and research, too, suggesting that they were serious about it.

According to them, a hamburger is best held with the thumb and pinky fingers on one side, and all the other fingers on the other, holding everything down. It may even work if you keep the angles right, though that’s if you want to bring math into your food.

5 How To Avoid Teapot Dripping

Tea is quickly coming up as a healthier and more organic alternative to caffeine (s/b coffee) around the world. If you’ve ever dabbled in it, you’d know that it also harbors one of the culinary world’s most curious mysteries; how to stop a teapot from dripping along its side when you’re serving it. It happens a lot and is admittedly a problem, though we still manage because tea really is quite healthy.

That can’t be said for the team of fluid dynamics experts that decided to apply some math to it. In a relentless pursuit to end teapot dripping once and for all, they carried out a detailed research into the matter. What they found will shock no one, and was honestly not a very big deal in the first place.

They found that the real problem is a phenomenon called the ‘hydro-capillary effect’, which causes the tea to spill no matter what you do. There are multiple ways to reduce it, like putting butter in the spout, using a teapot made out of a thinner material, or opting for a teapot with a thinner lip.

4 Can Spider-Man Scientifically Exist?

As a casual party conversation, it’s interesting to discuss whether superheroes could, theoretically speaking, exist in real life. It’s easier to answer for superheroes with outright supernatural abilities, as well as the ones with no abilities at all. For everyone in the middle, it gets complicated. While we realize that it’s an important thing to talk about, most of us wouldn’t ponder beyond it.

Some researchers, however, wanted to take the argument further. They took Spider-Man’s ability to stick to walls, and tried to figure out if it could actually be replicated in real life. As they found out, this is one ability humanity will never possess.

Apparently, geckos – according to physics – are the largest animals that could physically scale a wall. It has to do with the mechanics of how we interact with the wall. In order to successfully scale it perfectly like Spider-Man, our shoe size would either have to be a US 114, or 80% of the body’s frontal area would need to stick to the surface. As neither of those seem to be desirable – or even possible – options, they conclusively prove that no amount of scientific progress or evolutionary mutations could ever make us scale walls like geckos.

3 Who Is The Real Antichrist?

The real identity of The Antichrist is a rather theological question. It may even be a philosophical one, though it’s definitely not a mathematical one. We can think of no way you can use math to prove that some real person is, in fact, the Antichrist. For one, the Antichrist isn’t (likely) really a real figure. More importantly, any Antichrist who lets himself be found so easily is not a good Antichrist at all.

Those fundamental problems didn’t dissuade an American author called Robert W. Faid. He spent years – even getting other students and researchers in on the project – trying to find a mathematical link between the Antichrist and Mikhail Gorbachev; yes, the Soviet premier at the time. After painstaking research with higher forms of statistics and probability, he seemed to have found it, too, which he eventually published in a book. According to his research, the odds of Mikhail Gorbachev being the Antichrist were a whopping 710,609,175,188,282,000 to 1.

2How Much Saliva Does A Child Produce?

If you ask someone about an estimate on how much saliva they produce every day, it may come across as a weird question. Besides being too personal, it also doesn’t help with any sort of statistics. Calculating the saliva production may have its uses in some niche areas of medicine, though it’s not anything you’d go out of your way to check for anything in your daily life.

One team of scientists from the University of Hokkaido, Japan, on the other hand, decided to not just calculate that, but further narrow the subject field to just five-year old children. They applied a lot of calculations and general math to it, and came to the conclusion that an average five-year old produces about 500ml (about 17oz) of saliva every day.

1Where Can We Walk On Water?

Walking on water has fascinated humanity ever since the concept was first introduced in a bestselling book around two millennia ago. We won’t lie, we’ve had the thought of being able to do it once in a while, too, though as of now, our laws of physics simply don’t allow it. It’s a bummer, though most of us would probably not lose sleep over it.

That’s not true for this team of researchers from Italy, who came together to conduct the first ever detailed research on the conditions required to walk on water. They compared the structure of the human body with other animals, as well as check if human body is even built to walk on water in the first place.

Unfortunately, as they found out, there is no way we can ever walk on water on Earth. We can, however, walk on water on the moon, if there was water on the moon, and we were willing to go all the way to the Moon just to walk on water.

Solving crimes was a lot harder before DNA testing. Detectives today have a whole arsenal of crime scene investigation tools and gadgets to help them prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but it wasn’t always that easy.

Crime investigators have been around for thousands of years. All the way back in ancient Egypt, there were men hired to solve crimes. The Egyptians kept incredibly detailed records about it—and because of that, we have a pretty good idea what it was like to be a detective more than 3,000 years ago.

10 Trained Monkeys Would Attack Thieves

Ideally, a crime would be stopped before it was committed. Most of the police force in ancient Egypt were posted as guards around the cities, keeping an eye on the tombs and the markets to make sure nobody got out of line.

It was a pretty good deterrent. After all, if you got caught breaking the law in ancient Egypt, you might just end the day with an attack monkey on your face.

Guards in ancient Egypt would often have trained animals with them. Most of the time, they were dogs, but more than a few walked around with monkeys on leashes, poised to attack. There’s even a picture of them in action in one servant’s tomb. It shows a thief at a market trying to make his getaway, only to have an attack monkey on a leash tackle his leg, pulling him down to the ground and holding him in place until help arrived.^[1]

9 Snitching Was Mandatory By Law

When the detectives were called in, their jobs weren’t easy. Tracking down a criminal with ancient Egyptian technology can be tough to do without a good witness. So, the Egyptian courts made sure they had a witness by laying out serious penalties for failing to report a crime.^[2]

When Ramses III was assassinated, the police didn’t just round up the people responsible. They rounded up their butlers and servants, as well. They’d had plenty of chances to overhear the conspiracy, the courts ruled, and their failure to report it made them criminals. As punishment, their ears were cut off—since, as far as the courts were concerned, they weren’t making good use of them, anyway.

But you didn’t have to overlook a plot to overthrow the king to get in trouble. Any failure to report a crime carried heavy consequences, and that was a serious motivator.

One man, after hearing his boss for conspiring to rob a tomb, immediately sent a letter ratting him out. In his letter, he made it clear that it was fear of punishment that motivated him, writing: “I report them to my lord, for it were a crime for one like me to hear such words and conceal them.”

8 Ancient Egypt Had Crime Scene Investigators

Most investigations started with somebody ratting someone out. A citizen would get in line outside the court to complain about his neighbor, and if it was a serious enough crime, an investigator would be sent out on the job.

These investigations were surprisingly thorough. They didn’t just draw straws or go off a hunch—they would round up suspects, questions witnesses, investigate the crime scene, and even arrange reenactments to test theories about the crime. They even had detailed records of past accusations they could check to monitor peoples’ criminal histories.

When a tomb was robbed during the reign of Ramses IX, he sent out a team of investigators to check every single tomb in the area, just in case the thieves had broken in anywhere else.^[3] The team found the tunnel that the thieves had used to break in, measured its width and length, and even made educated guesses on the tools they’d used to get in.

Then they went to work rounding up suspects. They checked the city records for people with a knowledge of mining and a criminal history of robbery, brought them in, and started their investigation there.

7 Suspects And Witnesses Were Beaten Until They Talked

When it came time to get answers, though, the detectives didn’t exactly play nice. They just beat people senseless until they confessed.

They were very cavalier about torturing people. In the court records we have today, they very casually talked about it, with one quickly noting that the “examination was held by beating with a double rod.”

Typically, they’d tie the person to a stake and beat his hands and feet until he gave them the answers they wanted.^[4] If he denied all wrongdoing, they’d beat him again—or, as they worded it in one document, the witness would be “further examined with a rod.”

This wasn’t limited to suspects. Sometimes, witnesses who had done nothing wrong would be beaten until they gave their side of the story, especially if they had a reason to protect the accused. There are records of suspects’ sons, slaves, and wives being pulled out of their homes and beaten with a rod until they told the police exactly what they’d seen.

6 Confessions Were Compared To The Evidence

That all might sound barbaric today, but to the Egyptians’ credit, they did realize that beating prisoners could lead to false confessions. That’s why they spent so much time investigating crime scenes. They wanted to make sure these people weren’t just saying anything they wanted to hear.

Criminals’ testimonies would be compared to what they’d found at the crime scenes. Or, if a gang had worked together as a team, they would be separated before they were tortured to make sure their stories were the same.^[5] If all the details matched up, they knew they had the right people.

In one case, a man who had confessed to robbing a tomb was blindfolded and carried out to the valley where the robbery had taken place. Once he was there, the vizier who’d questioned him showed him rows upon rows of tombs. The suspect had to show him which one he had robbed so that they could see if he’d point at the right one.

5 Witnesses Had To Describe How They Would Be Mutilated If They Lied

It would have been easy to lie and feign ignorance, of course, but the consequences for lying were often worse than the consequences for the crime itself. In the case above, the coppersmith was warned that if the investigators were satisfied that he had lied, his nose and ears would be cut off, and his body would be stretched apart on the rack.

Threats like these were fairly common in ancient Egypt. When a witness gave a testimony in court, they wouldn’t swear an oath on the Bible like we do today. They’d outline in graphic detail exactly how the court could torture them if they found they’d lied.^[6]

The tortures varied. The judges would make them up on the spot, based on how serious they felt the crime was and whether the witness was rich or poor.

One woman was ordered to swear before the court: “Should witnesses be brought against me [ . . . ] I shall be liable to 100 blows.” Another was ordered to declare, “Should we speak falsely, the servants shall be taken away from us.” And a poor field laborer was ordered to tell the truth “on pain of mutilation.”

4 Corruption Was Rampant

All this investigation would be a lot of work—and there’s a lot of reason to believe that if you weren’t important, the courts didn’t bother doing much about it. There’s every indication that bribery and corruption were rampant in the ancient Egyptian courts, and a wealthy man could get the verdict he wanted by slipping the judge a few golden coins.

An Egyptian writer wrote a song begging the god Amun to help out the poor that gives a little insight into how people saw their legal system. In it, he complains that “the court extorts” the people in it, demanding “silver and gold for the clerks” in exchange for justice.

It was a major political problem. The head of Tutankhamun’s army put the judges in the country on trial for corruption, declaring: “They will not show mercy and be compassionate on the day they will judge the poor.” Those he convicted had their noses cut off and were sent off into exile.

But more than 200 years later, Rameses XI was still struggling with the same problem. When two policemen were accused of framing an innocent man, his general sent an order to “put them in two baskets and they shall be thrown into the water at night.”^[7]

He wanted to get rid of the problem before word got out that the police were unjust. The next words of the letter read: “Do not let anybody in the land find out!”

3 Infidelity Could Be Punished By Death

Divorce court was brutal. In ancient Egypt, anyone could take anyone else to court for having an affair. Unlike most of their neighbors, this wasn’t a right reserved for men. They let women sue their husbands for infidelity and divorce. They even let people sue random neighbors in their town who they thought were cheating on their wives.

The punishment was severe. If a woman was found guilty of cheating on her husband, she could have her nose cut off or, in some cases, could even be burned alive. Men, it seems, never got the death penalty for infidelity, but breaking the marriage bonds could still get him 1,000 blows and a writ of divorce.

In one case, an Egyptian official describes catching a mob prowling through the streets, yelling out that they’ve “come to beat up” a man in town who was caught sleeping with a woman who wasn’t his wife. After hearing them out, the official said in a letter, he decided to just let them do it.

“Indeed, [even] if I can repulse them this time, I shall not be able to repulse them again,” he wrote. Instead, he just admonished the girl for sleeping with a married man and ordered his men to let the beating happen and keep it quiet.

“When this letter reaches you,” the letter ends, “do not go to Neferti with this matter.”^[8]

2 Even If You Were Innocent, You Were Labeled A Criminal

The overwhelming majority of court cases in ancient Egypt ended with a guilty verdict. There only a handful of records of people leaving the courts as free men, and even then, they weren’t left off free.

One court record describes a man named Amenkhau who was repeatedly beaten by the police. No matter how hard they hit, he kept insisting: “I haven’t seen anything. Whatever I’ve seen you have heard from my mouth.”^[9] When no amount of torture would loosen his tongue, they decided he was probably telling the truth and let him go.

He wasn’t totally free, though. Even after he was found innocent, the accusation was permanently kept in the record books with the words “great criminal” next to his name.

That was just how it was done in ancient Egypt. If someone was accused of a crime, they believed, they’d probably done something wrong. And so, even if it was clear that you were innocent, you were labeled a “great criminal” for life.

1 Toward The End, They Just Let A Statue Decide

The above entries, at least, are how Egypt laid down the law during their prime. Sometime around 1000 BC, though, they gave up on this whole system of law and justice and settled in for one that was completely and totally insane.

In the last several hundred years of ancient Egypt’s power, the priests of Amun had taken over most of the country, including the legal system.^[10] Whenever a charge was filed against someone, they decided the verdict by asking a statue what to do.

The priests would ask a statue of Amun questions and watch how it moved to get their answers. If the statue moved forward, they told people it was saying “yes,” but if it moved backward, it was saying “no.”

Of course, the statue wasn’t really moving on its own. Secretly, they had a man inside or behind it pretending to be a god.

Sometimes, there wouldn’t even be an investigation. A court record from this time shows that in the trial of a man named Thutmose, they just put two tablets in front of the statue and asked Amun to move toward the verdict he wanted. They didn’t just say “guilty” or “not guilty”—the tablets were to decide whether they should bother investigating the case at all.

Thutmose, it seems, had some friends in the priesthood. In the new Egypt ruled by the corrupt priests, he was let go without a single witness being questioned.

Despite centuries of study, the universe remains largely mysterious, as does the planet we call home. The unknown inspires both wonder and curiosity, which, in turn, often prompt questions. Seeking answers, we gather facts, form hypotheses, and conduct observations or experiments. Sometimes, we remain puzzled. The causes of unlikely phenomena, of seemingly impossible developments, and of strange occurrences continue to mystify us.

At other times, however, we discover, we learn, and our knowledge expands. Nevertheless, new mysteries await. There are always more puzzles to solve. Each time we manage to unravel one of the mysteries of the universe, though, we are inspired again to seek more answers. We are a species with a need to know that can’t be satisfied, even when, through science, we manage to solve puzzling mysteries like the ten on this list.

10 Bizarre Unsolved Mysteries Of The World

10 Titan’s Waves

 

In many ways, Titan’s landscape looks like that of the Earth. Saturn’s moon has several “lakes . . . seas . . . [and] river channels.” However, these apparent bodies of water don’t contain water at all, nor were they carved by the running of water over eons of time. With surface temperatures as low as 290 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, Titan is much too cold—freezing, in fact—for water. Instead, scientists believe, a mix of liquid methane, ethane, and other freeze-resistant hydrocarbons are responsible for the apparent bodies of water.

Planetary scientists agree that the moon is a “wet world,” but they are mystified as to the reason that the lakes, seas, and river channels lack waves. After all, in addition to the moon’s low gravity, there is wind, as the moon’s plentiful sand dunes prove; therefore, there should be waves. Maybe the lakes are frozen. Maybe they’re “covered with a tar-like substance that damps wave motion.” These theories would account for the absence of waves, but new data suggest that these explanations are wrong.

There are waves, recent studies indicate. They just haven’t been visible because, during winter, the atmosphere is dense with “cold heavy air,” and the moon’s winds are too weak to move it—or to make waves. As the moon warms with the approach of summer, winds should strengthen and move fast enough to make waves detectable to radar. If so, Titan’s waves will help scientists to evaluate the climate conditions on Saturn’s moon and could indicate the “viscosity of the [waves’] underlying fluid” and its chemical make-up and help to determine “the speed of the overlying winds, providing an independent check of Titan climate models.” Mystery solved!^[1]

9 Greenland’s “Dark Zone”

 

Until summer, Greenland’s ice sheet, as viewed from the air, looks like an immense, bright white expanse. Then, as temperatures increase, the western edge of the field becomes dark, as algae grow there. This so-called dark zone has become increasingly larger in recent years. Scientists wanted to know why. What was causing the increase in algae?

The ice sheet covers much of the world’s largest island—1.71 million square kilometers (656,00 square miles), to be exact, which is three times the size of the state of Texas, and the sheet’s a mile thick! It may not be that size much longer, though. It’s in “permanent retreat . . . losing 500 gigatons (500 billion tons) of ice every year.” The increase in the size of the dark zone has a lot to do with the decrease in the ice sheet’s dimensions, scientists have found.

The mystery behind the surge in the growth of the algae that comprise the dark zone has now been solved. It’s caused by the layer of carbon and phosphorus-rich dust that covers the area. This layer of particulates reduces the amount of sunlight the ice sheet reflects into space, causing the ice to warm, and, in the spring, the ice melts, and the dormant algae “migrate to the surface,” where they benefit from “24-hour sunlight,” which enables the plants to photosynthesize and grow, as their green colors darken to protect the algae from the “constant sunlight.” The plants’ growth is further facilitated by the phosphorus-rich dust that’s locally supplied “from hydroxylapatite—a phosphate mineral that also contains calcium, oxygen, and hydrogen—that gets blown across the ice as dust from exposed rocky outcrops.”

The solution to the mystery of the dark zone’s growth should help scientists track the rate at which Greenland’s ice sheet melts, since the warmer atmosphere promotes greater deposits of phosphorus from local rocks, which, drier, expose more phosphorous, which, in turn, provides more nutrients to the algae, which then increasingly warms the ice, creating a continuing cycle.^[2]

8 Antarctica’s Blood Falls

 

An eerie red river runs across Taylor Glacier in east Antarctica. At the mouth of the glacier, the river tumbles over a cliff, into Lake Bonney, looking exactly like its name, Blood Falls. What caused the strange appearance of this mysterious blood-red river? This question has mystified scientists since its discovery in 1911. Originally, algae were considered the culprits, but this hypothesis was never verified.

What has been discovered by scientists associated with the University of Alaska Fairbanks is that “oxidized iron in brine water” gives Blood Falls its unusual color as the iron in the saltwater, making contact with oxygen in the air, oxidizes—in effect, rusts—and “dyes” the water red. The saltwater makes its way to the edge of the glacier from an underground lake, as pressure forces the water through the glacier’s “fissures and channels,” in a journey that takes 1.5 million years.

The water wouldn’t flow at all, of course, if it were frozen, but it avoids freezing because “latent heat associated with water freezing,” the water’s super-saturation in salt, and “the high pressures at the base of the glacier” maintain the saltwater at temperatures above freezing.^[3]

7 Parasaurolophus Skull

 

Paleontology is far from an exact science, as the myriad of qualifications that readers of texts concerning this field of research encounter clearly suggests. Debates are plentiful and, often, long-term. Such was the case with regard to how the skulls of the Parasaurolophus ever managed to grow on the heads of the rare species of dinosaur; disputations and arguments lasted decades.

The unusual skull includes an “exaggerated tube crest” that grows along the center of the front of the animal’s face and houses the dinosaur’s nasal passage, including its nostrils. “Imagine your nose growing up your face, three feet behind your head, then turning around to attach above your eyes,” paleontologist Terry Gates says, noting “Parasaurolophus breathed through eight feet of pipe before oxygen ever reached its head.”

Was the strange protuberance, which forms “much like other related duck-billed dinosaurs,” a “snorkel”? A “super sniffer”? These explanations were put forward once, but, now, scientists have solved the mystery of the tube crests. They were “sound resonators and visual displays used to communicate within their own species” at a time, 75 million-years ago, when, as the Denver Museum of Nature and Science explains, “a narrow sea” separated the North American continent.^[4]

6 Train Millipede Swarms

Although, officially, they are known as Parafontaria laminata armigera, the poisonous arthropods indigenous to Japan are colloquially called “train millipedes” because they swarm in such numbers that they stop trains in—or on—their tracks. First observed in 1920, the millipedes would teem across railroad tracks in Japan’s “forested mountains” in numbers so thick that trains would have to halt. Then, they wouldn’t be seen again for eight years, when they’d return, once again bringing trains to a standstill. The phenomenon remained a mystery until Keiko Niijima, a researcher at the Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute, figured it out. The millipedes weren’t somehow attracted to train tracks. They were just traveling to new “feeding grounds” that happened to lie on the other side of the tracks.

Their life cycle is eight years long, during which the whole population of the poisonous millipedes experience “the phases of life at the same time.” They are the only “non-insect” arthropod to have evolved this eight-year, synchronous life cycle. Adults and seventh nymphs (those on the stage of the life cycle that is just before that of adulthood) are so numerous that they consume everything they can and have to relocate to find more of the “dead or decaying leaves” on which their diet depends. The millipedes are unusual because of their defensive capability as well; should a predator attack, the millipedes release a powerful poison—cyanide.^[5]

Top 10 Puzzling Island Mysteries

5 Rogue Orca Attacks

 

Boats afloat off the coast of Spain have come under attack by rogue orcas. Some of the assaults are fierce. On September 22, 2020, a yacht lost its rudder when it came under attack by three orcas. The owner of the 45-foot vessel, Graeme Walker, recalled, “The boat would . . . spin through 90 degrees when the animals came in. . . . When they actually bit on the rudder and started shaking [it] the wheel was spinning from side to side. You could not have touched it. You would have broken your arms.” The same day that the whales battered Walker’s yacht, Spain’s Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda announced a protective measure. Boats under fifty feet long were banned from sailing between Cabo Prioriño Grande and Punta de Estaca de Bares, the location of the whales’ attacks.

The reason for the whale’s aggression remained a mystery until researchers analyzed footage of the attacks of a few of the killer whales, all of which were young. Two appeared to have been “seriously injured.” Although it was unclear whether their injuries were sustained before or during the attacks, the researchers believe that, in either case, the animals felt threatened, which probably explains their hostility.^[6]

4 Cell Bones

Cells don’t really have bones, of course, but they do have structures that perform functions similar to such connective tissue. In both plants and animals, actin filaments, “thin, flexible protein strands,” support cells and cellular functions, growing, shrinking, bonding “with other things,” and branching off as cells move. How actin filaments form chains by linking together, a process known as polymerization, was a mystery to scientists—a mystery that simulations using supercomputers helped to solve.

Researchers discovered that an actin filament lengthens much more rapidly at one end of a strand than it does at the other. The end that lengthens less quickly acts as a “binding site,” making a quick connection that allows the polymerization reaction to continue. This ability enables cells to perform a variety of tasks. For example, Gregory Voth, the Haig P. Papazian Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, says that “when a cell wants to move forward, . . . it will polymerize actin in a particular direction. Those actin filaments then push on the cell membrane, which allow[s] the cell to move in a particular direction.” The improved knowledge of how actin filaments act has important and “wide-ranging” therapeutic medical applications.^[7]

3 Flower Power

 

Charles Darwin couldn’t figure out how flowering plants first evolved, and he feared this “abominable mystery” might “undermine his theories of evolution.” Specifically, in an 1879 letter to his friend, Dr. Joseph Hooker, a botanist, Darwin admitted, “The rapid development as far as we can judge of all the higher plants within recent geological times is an abominable mystery.” How could flowering plants evolve so rapidly, when it had taken other living things, including mammals, a much longer time to do so? “Why isn’t there a gradual evolution of the angiosperms?” Darwin asked. “Why can’t we see intermediate forms between the gymnosperms—things like conifers—and the flowering plants? And why, when they appear, are they already so diverse?”

Scottish botanist William Carruthers used the “abominable mystery” to cast doubt on the theory of evolution, making claims about the “fossil record” that defenders of evolution were hard-pressed to address. Darwin, it seems, had good reason to fret about the quick appearance of angiosperms. According to Professor Richard Buggs, the “abominable mystery” remains unsolved to this day. What isn’t as puzzling, however, are the doubts that Darwin had about his own views on the evolution of life, even months before his death, and his fears that flowering plants might be the basis for challenging the very idea that life had developed as a series of adaptations to the environment over millions of years. The mystery of Darwin’s own thoughts about flower power and its possible effects on his own life’s work are now a mystery solved!^[8]

2 Geometric Droppings

 

The droppings of the bare-nosed wombat resemble charcoal briquettes. The nocturnal marsupial excretes as many as a hundred cubes of feces every day. How the wombat accomplishes this astonishing feat was a mystery. Now that scientists have unraveled the puzzle, they find the solution just as amazing. Sunghwan Jung, a biophysicist at Cornell University, wasn’t a member of the research team who found the answer, but the findings leave no doubt, he says, that the wombat’s intestines “are very special.”

The marsupials live in Australia’s “grassy plains and eucalyptus forests,” passing their days in tunnels and eating plants by night. To mark their territory, the animals leave their scat behind. Roadkill in the form of a wombat revealed part the answer concerning how the animals are able to produce cubes of dung. The wombat’s intestines contained “two grooves where the guts are more elastic.” The dissection of two additional wombats shed more light on the problem. A two-dimensional mathematical model of the animals’ guts indicated that the wombats’ “intestinal sections contract over several days, squeezing the [feces] as the gut [extracts] nutrients and water” from the excrement. “Stiffer portions” of the gut contract more rapidly, the soft areas more slowly, the latter molding “the final corners of the cube.”^[9]

1 White Smudge

 

Located beside the figure’s right arm, on the lower rail of the fence behind him, a mysterious white stain is discernible in one version of Edvard Munch’s famous painting, The Scream. Although the artist created four variants of the portrait of modern angst, one of which fetched £91 million (nearly 125 million U.S. dollars) in 2012, the most acclaimed one is displayed in the Norwegian National Museum. Unlike the other iterations of the work, this one includes several white splatters on its canvas.

Since Munch often painted outdoors, some believed the stain was the result of a bird perched or flying overhead. The white smudge, in other words, was avian excrement; a bird had defecated on the painting. Others believed the white smears to be chalk or paint that had somehow been deposited on the canvas as Munch was at work on the painting. When Professor Tine Frøysaker of the University of Oslo hired a team to determine the materials and techniques the artist had used in painting his subject, the Macro C-ray fluorescence scanner they used to test a sample of the mysterious white stain solved the mystery: the blemish was “molten wax,” the culprit “a candle in Munch’s studio,” graduate student Frederik Vanmeert, who analyzed the sample of the painting, reported.^[10]

10 Reasons Why Ninja Will Always Be A Mystery

About The Author: An English instructor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, Gary L. Pullman lives south of Area 51, which, according to his family and friends, explains “a lot.” His four-book series, An Adventure of the Old West, is available on Amazon.

During 1968 and 1969, the notorious Zodiac Killer murdered five people. Several witnesses saw one of the murders take place and described the killer as being a white male between 25 and 30 years old, with a crew cut and wearing glasses. Unfortunately, a dispatcher mistakenly told police that the suspect was a black male, leading to the man rounded up for questioning being released.

The Zodiac Killer taunted police by phone and contacted newspapers via a series of letters. In addition to this the murderer included puzzling codes in some of the letters he sent.

51 years later, the mystery of the Zodiac Killer’s identity remains, but one of his ciphers containing 340 characters was finally solved by a team of amateur codebreakers in December 2020. This breakthrough has raised hopes that more mysteries might be solved in 2021, including the truth behind the MH370 crash and the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.

10 Unsolved Mysteries Of Ancient Egypt

10 Brayman Road attacker

On 22 August 1988, social worker “Carol” was on her way to work at the local psychiatric hospital in Putnam, Connecticut. As she drove along Brayman Hollow Road, the driver of a black pickup truck in front of her started behaving erratically. He would abruptly brake after speeding up and cross the centre line, almost scraping the sides of oncoming cars. Carol stayed behind the truck, at a safe distance, but no one could have predicted the horror that would follow.

The driver of the pickup suddenly stopped in the middle of the road, pulled out a gun and walked towards Carol’s vehicle that had come to a stop as well. The man halted 10 feet from Carol and then shot her in the face. He jumped back into his truck and sped off, leaving Carol semi-conscious and partially paralyzed. A few minutes passed without anyone noticing Carol slumped behind her steering wheel. A utility truck passed by and its driver saw the strange angle at which Carol was positioned in her car, after which he immediately called the police and paramedics.

Doctors fought to save Carol after she arrived at the hospital. Her carotid artery was severed, and her face torn apart. Miraculously, Carol survived, and she physically recovered well from the trauma.

Her attacker was never found however, even after more reports emerged of a driver in a black pickup, taunting motorists on the Brayman Hollow Road. Witnesses reported that the driver was a white male, with curly brown hair, average build and would be middle-aged today. The pickup was a step-side with flared fenders.

9 Disappearance of Alessia and Livia Schepp

On Friday, 28 January 2011, six-year-old twins Alessia and Livia Schepp were taken from their home in St. Sulpice, Switzerland by their father, Mathias. The following day he sent a message to his ex-wife and the twins’ mother, Irina, saying that he would bring them home Monday, 31 January. Instead, he took the twins and they crossed the border into France after which Mathias sent Irina, a postcard. Mathias was seen by several people and captured by cameras up until 3 February 2011 after which he threw himself under a train in Italy. The last time anyone saw the twins, however, was on 31 January when Mathias took them on a ferry that transported them from mainland France to Corsica.

A letter written by Mathias, dated 3 February 2011, stated that he had killed Alessia and Livia and that ‘they did not suffer.’ Police established that Mathias had researched suicide, poison and guns before taking the ferry trip, and feared that the twins were indeed dead.

However, no remains have never been found and the little girls’ ultimate fate is still a mystery.

8 Where is Susan Powell?

Everything that happened after a neighbor left Susan Powell’s home on the afternoon of December 6, 2009, was strange and ultimately tragic. The whole Powell family was reported missing on December 7 by their relatives after Susan’s mother-in-law and sister-in-law didn’t find anyone when they arrived at the Powell home. Susan’s husband, Joshua, arrived home in the late afternoon with their sons, Charles and Braden, in tow claiming the three of them had been camping in Simpson Springs.

On December 9 police found small traces of Susan’s blood in the Powell family home, as well as a letter written by Susan in which she expressed that she was afraid for her life. Braden in the meantime had drawn a picture of a van with three people inside while at daycare, and told a teacher that his “mommy was in the trunk.” Charlie on the other hand told police that he and his brother went camping with both his mother and father, but that his mother didn’t return with them.

By December 10, police had searched for and failed to find the camp site Joshua spoke of. During the investigation, a secret will, and a very disturbing video made by Susan was discovered. It was also discovered that Joshua’s father, Steven, had been obsessed with Susan and took pictures of her without her knowing.
Police were soon convinced that Joshua killed Susan and roped in his brother, Michael, to help him get rid of Susan’s body. There wasn’t enough evidence to charge them however, and now police will never get the chance to. On February 5, 2012 Joshua Powell attacked his two sons with a hatchet and then set off a gas leak explosion killing them all. A year later, Michael Powell, jumped off a parking structure in Minneapolis and died on impact.

The investigation in Susan Powell’s disappearance has been closed without her body being found. Her family hasn’t given up hope and continues to search, in the hope of gaining some small form of closure.

7 Virginia murders

In October 2009, 20-year-old Morgan Dana Harrington disappeared without a trace after being denied entry back into a Metallica concert in Charlottesville. She was seen alive for the last time, trying to hitch a lift back home. Her remains were found in a field three months later on January 26, 2010. She had been raped and brutally murdered. Six years later a 33-year-old suspect, Jesse Matthew, was apprehended. At the time he was facing a capital murder charge of another young woman, 18-year-old Hannah Graham, who disappeared in Charlottesville in September 2014. Hannah’s remains were found five years after Morgan was killed.
Three other young women also disappeared in and around Charlottesville. 17-year-old Alexis Murphy disappeared from a Lovingston gas station in August 2013. Her remains were never found but evidence recovered from a trailer led to the murder conviction of 48-year-old Randy Taylor.

19-year-old Samantha Ann Clarke left her home in September 2010, taking only her keys with her, and was never seen again. 19-year-old Dashad ‘Sage’ Smith disappeared after leaving her home in November 2012, telling her friend she would be back soon. In the case of these two women, there is no closure and their families still live with the uncertainty over their fate every day. The suspect in Sage’s case, Erik McFadden, disappeared shortly after Sage and his mother reported him missing in 2019. Sage’s whereabouts is still unknown. Randy Taylor is considered a suspect in disappearance of Samantha but hasn’t been charged since there is no evidence of foul play. Samantha’s fate, too, is unknown.

6 The case of the tortured teenager

In February 1979, Bob Livesey left to start a night shift at Leyland Motors, while unbeknownst to him, his wife Margaret was meeting up with her lover at a pub in Bamber Bridge, Lancashire. The man dropped Margaret at home later where her 14-year-old son Alan was in his room, grounded after taking a car and causing an accident. Margaret then went to her neighbors’ house after which the neighbor’s son set off for the Livesey home and found Alan lying face down on the ground in front of a gas fire. He had knife marks on his face and eyelid, several stab wounds to his body and had been tied up.

Within five days, Margaret Livesey had confessed to stabbing her son with a kitchen knife, saying that she had completely lost control of herself after an argument with Alan. Three days later, she retracted the confession, claiming that police had coerced her into saying she was guilty of murder. Two trials later, Margaret was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. She was freed on parole in 1989 and maintained her innocence until she died of cancer in 2000.

Supporters of Margaret insist that she couldn’t possibly have had enough time to get home, kill Alan and visit the neighbors in the 30-minute window experts believe Alan had been murdered in. Some theories claim that a mystery figure had been spotted in the Livesey back yard the night of the murder, before Margaret had come home. Margaret’s family stood with her, also protesting her innocence.

Was Margaret truly innocent? Did a random stranger kill Alan Livesey? In 2016 a new inquiry was opened into the case, with detectives reviewing evidence after a long campaign by the Livesey family. The outcome is unknown.

5 What happened to Diane Dye?

Her parents’ divorce made 13-year-old Diane Genice Dye very unhappy. It was 1979 and her father had moved out of their family home in San Jose, her mother was working long hours and times were just tough. Diane had a best friend, Natja, who was like a brother to her and he could see that the divorce was taking a toll on her. She started smoking marijuana and skipping school. On July 30, 1979, Diane told Natja that she wanted to run away. Natja spoke to her for an hour, consoling her and trying to talk her out of it. Diane then thanked him, but asked him to leave her alone.

Three days later, Natja pitched up at Diane’s house only to find her mother in a state. She told him that Diane had been missing for three days. 41 years later, there have been claims of sightings of Diane all over America, but none panned out. It is as if the girl disappeared off the face of the earth. A friend alleged that she saw Diane at a mall in December 1981 and that Diane told her she wasn’t planning on going back home.

Authorities have questioned an inmate, Doug Young, on death row many times but he has consistently denied having anything to do with Diane’s disappearance even though he was seen talking to her before she went missing.

To date, there have been no new leads and Diane’s disappearance remains a mystery.

4 Who shot Cherice Lynnae Jacobsen?

On March 8, 1990 16-year-old Cherice Lynnae Jacobsen attended an all-night prayer vigil at the Christian Life Centre in Stockton, California. She was serious about her faith and wanted to graduate in June so that she could attend the Christian Life College. At one point she left the prayer vigil and returned at 12am. At 1:30am she stepped out and headed for the church’s parking lot to retrieve a bottle of lotion from a car. She walked back to the church building at 1:40am. The pastor’s son, Nathaniel, heard something that sounded like a ‘pop.’ He was standing near the front door at the time, and he saw Cherice pause, look over her shoulder and then drop to the ground.

He ran to her and saw that she had been shot in the head above her left ear. Cherice was rushed to the hospital, but she died two hours later.

A few weeks before she died, Cherice told several family members and friends of a strange dream she’d had. In her dream she stood before an executioner while the Lord spoke to her. The Lord told her “There will be many youths brought into the Kingdom of God because of your death.” The executioner wanted Cherice to deny God, but she refused. Cherice’s best friend, Cindy Garcia, told reporters after her death that Cherice knew she was going to die and that she wanted Nathaniel to officiate her funeral.

In 2021, the case is still officially cold with no one ever being charged for Cherice’s murder.

3 The Beaumont children

On January 26, 1966, the Beaumont siblings, 9-year-old Jane, 7-year-old Arnna, and 4-year-old Grant set off for a beach that was located just a few minutes from their home in Somerton Park, Adelaide. It was a hot day, and their mother Nancy didn’t hesitate to give them permission to spend the day at the sea. The elated kids boarded a bus at around 10:10 that morning, Jane holding a copy of Little Women in her hand.

They had a ball on the beach, and as an elderly woman watched them frolicking about, she saw a tall, blond man in blue swim trunks watch them too. Then he approached them. The woman saw the children leave with him. Other witnesses saw the children at a cake shop and apparently, they bought a meat pie along with other treats, paying for their goods with a one-pound note. Yet more witnesses saw the man in the blue trunks helping the kids get dressed after they were done playing around in the sprinklers at Colley Reserve. That was the last confirmed time the Beaumont children were seen. They never returned home.

Police followed every available lead from the start, but Nancy Beaumont passed away in 2019 at the age of 92 without ever knowing what happened to her three children. The authorities never gave up and dug up an Adelaide factory site as recently as 2018 in the hopes of finding answers. They didn’t find any new clues.
The man in the blue trunks was never identified.

2 The imposter

13-year-old Nicholas Barclay was a troubled teenager and was scheduled for a court hearing on 14 June 1994 that would have determined whether his future included a home for juvenile delinquents. When he disappeared on 13 June 1994, his family immediately assumed he had run away to avoid the court hearing.

Three years later, police from Spain contacted San Antonio authorities to let them know they had found Nicholas after he escaped from a military child sex trafficking ring. Nicholas’ sister, Carey, set off for Spain and positively identified him even though the person claiming to her brother had brown hair and eyes compared to Nicholas’s blond hair and blue eyes. Also, he had a strong French accent which could not be said of Nicholas Barclay. Nevertheless, the Barclay family accepted the young man and all his explanations for his physical differences. They even told the local police to close the case.

Detective Charlie Parker wasn’t convinced, and he eventually got the imposter to admit that his real name was Frédéric Bourdin and that he was a fugitive on the run from Interpol. This was after Bourdin had invaded the Barclay family home for 5 months. Bourdin was sent to prison for 6 years.

Nicholas Barclay was never found, and it remains unclear whether he is still alive.

1 The missing girls

13-year-old Joan Horn, 11-year-old Odette Boucher, 12-year-old Anne-Marie Wapenaar, 12-year-old Yolande Wessels, 12-year-old Fiona Harvey and 14-year-old Tracey-Lee Scott Crossley were kidnapped by paedophile Gert van Rooyen and his lover, Joey Haarhoff in South Africa between 1988 and 1990. Another victim, 16-year-old Joan Booysen, managed to escape Van Rooyen’s Pretoria house and alerted the police. When Van Rooyen realized his time was up, he shot and killed Haarhoff before turning the gun on himself.

As the years passed, police did everything they possible could to try and locate the kidnapped girls. Their efforts involved the demolishing of Van Rooyen’s home to search for clues, and the excavating of his garden and swimming pool. They investigated the possibility that the girls’ bodies were buried near a cemetery in northwest Pretoria and they excavated numerous sites around Blythedale Beach in Durban, KwaZulu Natal after it was established that Van Rooyen had holidayed in the area shortly before his death.

No trace of the girls has ever been found.

10 Baffling Disappearances That Remain Unsolved

We tend to think of history as a book that has been written. So to find out anything, all you have to do is look up the facts, and you can find what you want to learn. But to the frustration of historians, history is riddled with mysteries. Some of the things that are unknown may seem as if they will never be solved, but advances in science are revealing more and more about history all the time.

Here are ten mysteries about royalty that have been put to rest through the application of science.

Related: 10 Mysteries And Secrets Surrounding British Royalty

10 The Romanovs

The Romanov family ruled the vast domains of Russia for three centuries as autocratic monarchs. Few royal families in Europe enjoyed as much luxury and power as the Romanovs. In 1917 however, the whole facade of their authority crumbled. Losses in the First World War and a desire for change saw Tsar Nicholas II forced to abdicate. With his family, he was captured by Bolsheviks and moved to a secure location in Yekaterinburg. There they disappeared from sight in 1918.

At first, the Soviet leadership announced that Nicholas II was executed, but it remained unclear what had happened to the rest of the royal family. This led to confusion as to whether any of them had survived. Several people even came forward claiming to be the missing members of the Romanov family.

In 1991 the missing remains of several members of the royal family were uncovered. By studying the DNA, researchers were able to confirm that they were related, but they needed to examine other relations to prove they were the Romanovs. DNA samples were taken from other royals, including Britain’s Prince Philip—a grand nephew of Alexandra Romanov—that positively identified most members of the missing family. Intriguingly, however, the bodies of the heir to the throne Alexei and his sister Anastasia were not found.^[1]

9 Anastasia

Of the people claiming to be a surviving Romanov, none was more famous than Anna Anderson. In 1920 a young woman attempted to commit suicide by leaping into a canal in Berlin. Pulled to safety and taken to a hospital, the woman refused to identify herself, and so she was admitted as “Miss Unknown.”

A fellow patient at the hospital claimed that the unknown woman was Tatiana, one of the missing Russian princesses, but those who knew the royal family did not think she looked like the girl they had known. Other Russians began to believe that the unknown woman just might be the missing Princess Anastasia, however. She took the name Anna Anderson. While some continued to think she was Anastasia, others declared “categorically that she is not Anastasia Nicolaievna, but just an adventuress, a sick hysteric and a frightful playactress.”

Over the following decades, Anna Anderson pressed her rights to portions of the Romanov fortune in various lawsuits but never managed to convince everyone that she was the missing princess. The mystery was only definitively solved after her death.

With the recovery of the bodies of the Romanovs, DNA comparisons were made and proved that Anna Anderson was not related to them. In fact, she was identified as a Polish factory worker named Franziska Schanzkowska. In 2007, two more bodies were discovered that had Romanov DNA. All the missing Russian royals were, therefore, accounted for.^[2]

8 Richard III

There is no English king with a more villainous reputation than Richard III. According to his enemies, he came to the throne by murdering his nephews, the true heirs to the throne, known as the Princes in the Tower. The young Edward V disappeared when he was just 12 years old, allowing his uncle Richard to become king.

Richard III’s reign was itself a short one. He met his end at the Battle of Bosworth Field against the rival claimant to the throne, Henry Tudor. Richard was defeated and killed. The only clues to what happened to Richard were references to how his corpse was treated after the battle. “His body… (as tradition hath delivered) was borne out of the City, and contemptuously bestowed under the end of Bow-Bridge.”

Historians thought they had identified a potential burial site in the city of Leicester but excavating the whole area was beyond their resources. They decided to dig up just 1% of the site in search of Richard III’s grave. Incredibly, on the first day, bones were discovered, and DNA later confirmed them to be the lost king.

By examining the bones, it was found that Richard III was not a hunchback as some enemies portrayed him, though he did have scoliosis. While they could not tell which wound killed him, his body was badly mutilated around the time of his death.^[3]

7 Delphine Boël

Not all royal mysteries are ancient. Some involve people who are very much alive. For example, in 1999, a Belgian teenager published an unauthorized biography of Queen Paola of Belgium that hinted that King Albert II of Belgium had fathered an illegitimate daughter several decades earlier. Soon the press identified Delphine Boël as this potential daughter.

In a message to the Belgians, the king made what seemed to be an oblique reference to these claims. “The Queen and I remember very happy times, but also the crisis that we experienced more than 30 years ago. Together we could, over a long time, overcome those difficulties and recover a deep understanding and love for each other. This period was recalled to us recently. We don’t wish to dwell on that subject which belongs to our private lives.” Yet, he refused to confirm the rumors.

When Delphine decided to confirm her paternity, it took a court order to convince Albert II to provide a DNA sample. For every day that he refused to give one, he would be fined €5,000. This sample proved that Delphine was his daughter and gave her the right to call herself a Princess of Belgium. Today she is known as Her Royal Highness Princess Delphine Michèle Anne Marie Ghislaine de Saxe-Cobourg.^[4]

6 Albert I’s Death

Albert II of Belgium was not the only Belgian king to have a mystery associated with him. Albert I of Belgium was a keen climber, and in 1934 he set out alone to scale a rock-face in the Ardennes region. His body was later found dangling from a rope. While this seemed like an obvious accident, rumors began to swirl that the king had been murdered or committed suicide somewhere else, and the body moved to make it look like a simple fall while climbing. Some even claimed that the king’s body was never even where it was said to have been discovered.

Part of the problem with confirming what had happened was that people descended on the site in great numbers—some of them taking away souvenirs that might have helped an investigation. Many took away blood-soaked leaves. But these have been used to confirm that Albert I was found where officials claimed.

These grisly souvenirs were DNA tested, and the blood on them was confirmed to be that of the king. Despite being severely far-sighted, the king was an expert climber. It seems that Albert I simply slipped and hit his head, depositing the blood that was snatched up by locals.^[5]

5 Hatshepsut

Hatshepsut was only the second female pharaoh to sit on the throne of Egypt. After the death of her husband in 1479 BC, she ruled as regent for his son, but because of her royal blood, she effectively became the ruling pharaoh. In statues and inscriptions, she is shown with all the regalia of a pharaoh, including the ceremonial beard.

After ruling Egypt for 20 years, Hatshepsut died, and her successor, Thutmose III, the son of Hatshepsut’s dead husband, took steps to destroy Hatshepsut’s legacy. Inscriptions that mentioned her were chiseled out and statues with her image toppled. While Hatshepsut’s tomb had been discovered, her mummy was missing. Was this another part of the attempts to erase her from history?

Howard Carter discovered a small tomb with two female mummies in it in 1903. One of the bodies belonged to Sitre-In, the woman who had been Hatshepsut’s wet nurse. The other had no identifying marks. But a tooth had earlier been discovered in a box containing organs from Hatshepsut. By comparing this tooth to the unidentified mummy’s jaw, it was possible to positively identify the mummy as that of one of ancient Egypt’s most fascinating rulers. Why her body was removed from her own sarcophagus, however, remains a mystery.^[6]

4 Philip of Macedon’s Tombs

Philip II of Macedon was one of the greatest military leaders of ancient Greece. Today, he would be a household name if he had not fathered an even greater conqueror—Alexander the Great. In 1977, some of the royal tombs of Macedon were excavated, and one of them was thought to be the tomb of Philip II.

All of the tombs were filled with splendid artifacts of incredible value, but it was uncertain which, if any, belonged to Philip II. However, a recent examination of the bodies found has suggested that the bones of Philip have finally been identified.

Despite being an excellent general, Philip was injured several times during his career. At one siege, he lost his right eye. In another, his lower right leg was badly wounded. When the bones of the man found in one tomb were looked at, they showed massive damage to the right knee that caused the leg bones to fuse. The age of the bones also suggests these are the bones of King Philip. The tomb of Alexander the Great remains one of the most tantalizing archaeological discoveries waiting to be found.^[7]

3 Eadgyth

The oldest confirmed remains of a British royal belong to Eadgyth, daughter of King Edward the Elder and granddaughter to King Alfred the Great, who died in 946 AD. Eadgyth was sent to Germany and married the Holy Roman Emperor Otto I. Eadgyth died in her thirties and was mourned by her husband. Yet what happened to her body was something of an open question.

In 2008, a sarcophagus was dug up in Magdeburg Cathedral. Inside were the partial remains of a woman and an inscription that these were the bones of Eadgyth, having been reburied in 1510. DNA testing was impossible, so researchers had to look at other indicators to confirm these were Eadgyth’s bones.

The bones were found to be from a woman in her thirties, and wear on them showed she was a horse rider—placing her among the upper classes. By analyzing the isotopes in the enamel on the teeth in the coffin, they found that this lady had grown up in Wessex, as Eadgyth had. Further work showed that Eadgyth had eaten a diet rich in fish and meat, something only a wealthy person could do. Having almost certainly identified Eadgyth, she was reburied in a titanium coffin, hopefully, to rest in peace.^[8]

2 Tutankhamun’s Death

No pharaoh of Egypt has more name recognition than Tutankhamun. This is not because of any famous deeds attributed to his life but rather the spectacular nature of the tomb he was found in. When Howard Carter opened Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, he peered inside and saw “wonderful things.” Vast numbers of golden objects were discovered that revealed the magnificence of an undisturbed royal tomb.

Yet, the body of Tutankhamun revealed a number of mysteries. The king had died young, and bone fragments seen on an x-ray suggested to some that he had died of a head wound. This gave rise to the theory that Tutankhamun had been attacked and murdered. Recent scans have suggested another theory.

Tutankhamun’s remains are in a bad state of preservation because when the body was first found, it was glued in place by the resins used to embalm it. Carter and others had broken many of Tutankhamun’s bones to free the gold mask over its head. But CT scans have revealed that one of the bone breaks, that on his leg, were made just before Tutankhamun died. It seems likely that the young king suffered an accident that shattered his leg and caused an infection that killed him.^[9]

1 Louis XVII

The French Revolution saw the destruction of the royal family of France. King Louis XVI and his queen Marie-Antoinette were both executed by guillotine, but they were not the only royals. Their young son Louis was heir to the throne, and this left the revolutionaries in a quandary. If they left him alive, he could claim the throne as King Louis XVII. On the other hand, if they killed a young child, they would be seen as barbarous. So instead, they locked Louis up alone in a prison cell and left him to die in horrible conditions.

After two years in prison, the handsome young boy was a mass of sores and had a distended stomach from malnutrition. A doctor was called but far too late, and the prince died. A quick autopsy was carried out, but the body was hurried into a mass grave, and the revolutionaries hoped that would be the end of the story. Unfortunately, without a clearly identified body, over 100 pretenders popped up across the world, all claiming the French throne.

Fortunately, the doctor who performed the autopsy stole the heart from the prince’s body. This shriveled relic was stolen and passed down through the years until it was returned to surviving members of the Bourbon family and placed in the royal crypt in Paris. A small piece of this heart was sawn off and used to confirm that it belonged to Prince Louis. This confirmation was possible because a strand of his mother Marie-Antoinette’s hair had been preserved in a necklace.^[10]

We just began another year, and we still don’t know MH370’s final resting place, who Jack the Ripper was, or whether the Alcatraz three really survived their brazen escape. Astronomers are still trying to solve intriguing space mysteries, and scientists are still hoping to find out what caused the Cambrian Explosion. The Ark of the Covenant remains lost, and JonBenet’s killer remains unidentified.

Mysteries are born every day, and some live and evolve over a long time before being solved. Unfortunately, others remain unsolved as the years, decades, and centuries pass.

On this list are more varied mysteries that have accumulated around the world and that have yet to be solved.

Related: 10 Murder Mysteries That Went Unsolved For Years

10 Hemet Maze Stone

It was 1914, and a rancher on the outskirts of Hemet, California, was surveying his property when he came across a large boulder with a strange image carved into it. Archaeologists were called, and upon further investigation, they found artifacts near the stone, which led them to conclude that the carving on the boulder was around 500 years old.

The stone carving is reminiscent of a swastika shape—a symbol used for millennia in Asian and Native American art—and forms an intricate maze. This makes it different from the other petroglyph designs found in the U.S., as these are usually images of animals, people, or nature. A theory was put forward after other stones with similar maze images were found near the original stone. It explained that Chinese sailors may have carved them after being shipwrecked in California. However, to this day, it remains unclear whether this theory is the truth. Archaeologists also still don’t know the reason for the carvings.^[1]

9 Rock Apes

So-called cryptid sightings usually consist of blurry images or video footage that may or may not resemble some kind of creature, whether it’s Bigfoot, Nessie, or some other folklore beast.

During the Vietnam War, cryptid sightings were numerous, and many American troops gave detailed accounts of what they believed was an encounter with a rock ape or “batutut.” A particular hill in Vietnam came to be known as Monkey Mountain after a high number of rock ape sightings purportedly took place there. Encounters with rock apes usually saw the cryptids throwing rocks back at troops. Some even hurled grenades back at the soldiers. The creatures are said to be at least six feet tall, with long limbs and big stomachs. It is thought that they live in troops instead of navigating the Vietnam jungles alone.

Reports of the rock apes being covered in reddish-brown hair caused some to think that they were simply orangutans. However, orangutans became extinct in Vietnam thousands of years ago. Another theory is that the troops were hallucinating because of the extreme stress and unfamiliar environment.

In 1974, the Vietnam People’s Army launched an expedition to try and capture a rock ape for research purposes. Nothing ever came of it.^[2]

8 Aleya Ghost Lights

Spooky mysteries are usually the most popular. Historic places, in particular, often have secrets lurking around every corner. West Bengal was founded in 1947 and, over the years, has become famous for its creepy buildings and cemeteries. One of its main claims to spooky fame is the Aleya ghost lights that flicker above the swamps here.

Ghost lights have been reported around the world, but the Aleya lights seem sinister in their intent. It is alleged that many fishermen have drowned after being transfixed by them. It is also believed that the lights are the spirits of the dead fishermen who are now stuck in the marshes.

Urban legends say that several bodies of fishermen have washed up on the shores of the swamps and that these remains were surrounded by a strange mist. Their deaths were never explained.

The first scientific explanation for ghost lights was that lightning interacts with the gas over swamps, creating the lights. This theory was rejected because the lights seem to move in tandem with people who come close to them. Other theories say that fireflies or barn owls are responsible for the phenomenon.^[3]

For now, however, the obvious cause of the lights remains a mystery.

7 The Missing Nuclear Bomb

On February 5, 1958, an F-86 fighter plane collided with a B-47 bomber during a practice exercise. The bomber was carrying a Mark 3,400 kg nuclear bomb at the time of the collision, and for the safety of the aircrew, the bomb was dropped from the plane. There was no explosion as the bomb struck the sea below.

An initial search ensued for the discarded bomb, and then another and another. The bomb was never found. There is some disagreement and controversy about whether the bomb is a functional weapon or whether it had a dummy core installed. Searches for the bomb continued, and in 2004, Air Force Lt. Colonel Derek Duke announced that he’d narrowed the search field down to an area the size of a football field. However, this, too, was a dead end.

The bomb is believed to still be in the water off Tybee Island and still hold 400 pounds of explosives. Further searches are now on hold, with the Air Force saying it’s best to leave the weapon be.^[4]

6 Mysterious Particles

Since 2016, ultra-high-energy particles have shot up through the thick ice in Antarctica three times. These events set off detectors in the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna experience. These events also didn’t match the behavior of Standard Model particles, and they looked like ultra-high-energy neutrinos. However, if they were neutrinos, they should not have been able to pass through the Earth.

Scientists have produced several theories to explain the phenomenon, including sterile neutrinos and atypical dark matter distributions, but these have yet to be proven correct.

At a loss for answers, some have turned to unconventional theories. The strangest one of the bunch says that the particles may be evidence of a parallel universe, where time flows backward, and the Big Bang would mean the end of the world.^[5]

5 The Moorgate Tragedy

On February 28, 1975, a train crashed while traveling along the Northern City Line in London. Forty-three people died, another 74 were injured, and the accident became known as the worst of its kind during peacetime. The tragedy came after the train failed to stop at a platform and crashed into a concrete wall at the end of the tunnel at the Moorgate station. The rescue operation lasted six days, and engineers started investigating the cause of the accident immediately after.

However, they couldn’t find an answer. The train was mechanically sound, which led them to suspect that the train driver was to blame. It was found that the driver had his hand on the power handle until two seconds before impact, and he didn’t try to protect his face as the train slammed into the concrete. Survivors told authorities that the driver behaved strangely, almost zombie-like, as the train sped toward its horrible fate. At that time, 56-year-old Lesley Newson had been with London Transport for six years, and there had been no red flags regarding his state of mind during that time.

On the day of the crash, he’d had money on him that was meant to be for his daughter’s car, and there was no indication that he’d been suicidal or intended to perform an act of terror. An autopsy on Newson revealed that he was in good health, and he had a tiny amount of alcohol in his system.

What happened to Newson that day remains unknown—whether he had been in a fugue state or given a substance that altered his thinking. It also remains unknown whether he deliberately crashed the train or whether an undiscovered condition caused him to become “blank” and crash the train.^[6]

4 A Matter of Existence

According to Plato, Atlantis existed 9,000 years before he was born. Plato’s writings are also the only known records that mention Atlantis. Most scholars believe that Atlantis was simply a fictional place, dreamed up by Plato, but some believe it was an actual city that eventually sank beneath the sea. It is also said to have taken an advanced civilization with it when it vanished beneath the surface.

There are several theories about Atlantis, including that it was a continent on its own, located in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean before it was submerged. Another theory says that the Bermuda Triangle is to blame for Atlantis’s disappearance. Yet another theory has it that Antarctica lies over the lost city of Atlantis and that it is still frozen underneath thick layers of ice.^[7]

Did Plato invent Atlantis and model the idea of it after his vision of an ideal civilization? Or is Atlantis lying deep down in the depths of the sea, just waiting to be discovered?

3 Robert Rayford

Robert Rayford, or Robbie as he was affectionately known, was around 15 years old in 1968. At that time, he started developing intense pelvic pain, testicular swelling, and difficulty breathing, and sores broke out all over his body. The doctors who examined him soon suspected that the teenager had been subjected to sexual abuse, as he tested positive for severe chlamydia, which had already spread throughout his system. Robbie told the doctors different stories about his sexual history, saying that he’d slept with only one girl and then saying that he was still a virgin.

Robbie Rayford died in May 1969 after contracting pneumonia, leaving medical personnel stunned as to what the true cause of his death may have been because his other symptoms just didn’t gel. So they saved some of his cells in cold storage and moved on.
Twenty years later, the world was in the grip of the AIDS pandemic. One of the doctors who treated Rayford tested the saved tissue samples using the Western blot test, only to find that it tested positive for antibodies against all nine detectable HIV proteins.

Speculation ensued, and some doctors believed Rayford was Patient Zero in the AIDS epidemic. However, he could not have contracted it via international travel, as he’d never left the Midwestern United States where he was born. This means he never traveled to New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles, where the disease first started causing havoc in America.
.
While it remains unconfirmed how Rayford contracted HIV twenty years before AIDS was even identified, some experts believe that he’d been forced into child prostitution.^[8]

2 Fort Hood Deaths

In 2020 alone, 39 soldiers stationed at the Fort Hood army base in Texas died or vanished. Among these, thirteen took their own lives, five were murdered, and eleven remain unsolved. Additionally, army data showed that around 129 felonies had been committed at the base between 2014 and 2019, and these crimes varied between murder, kidnapping, aggravated assault, rape, and more.

These shocking stats are higher than that of American deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan during the same year.

In October 2021, yet another soldier was found dead behind the barracks at Fort Hood. Twenty-six-year-old Spc. Maxwell Hockin’s body was found just days after a soldier who had been reported missing returned to the base unharmed. As of this writing, Hockin’s cause of death has not been revealed.

The numbers are alarming and have increased significantly since 2014. The reasons behind the Fort Hood slayings, deaths, and disappearances remain unknown, but ongoing investigations have been implemented to try and curb the seemingly unrestrained flow of tragedy.^[9]

1 Strange Burial

During the 1960s, a shallow grave was uncovered in the Tunel Wielki cave system in the Jurassic Highland of Poland. Inside it lay the skeleton of a child with a tiny skull inside the gaping hole that used to be her mouth. Proper examination of the remains was only completed recently, and it was found that the small skull was that of a finch. Another bird skull was also found alongside the remains.

It has since been determined that the remains belong to a young girl, perhaps between 10 and 12 years old, and that a bird had been placed in her mouth when she was buried. It is believed that the girl had come to the country with the Finnish troops who invaded Poland during the 17th century.

This is the only Scandinavian bird-headed burial that has ever been discovered in the area, and the girl’s cause of death also remains a mystery.^[10]

There are still some mysteries in the world, despite vigorous debunking, ongoing investigations, plain old skepticism, and in some cases, a scary lack of clues or information. On this list are just some of these.

Related: Top 10 Mysteries And Crimes Solved By The Internet

10 The Child Eater of Bern

Switzerland is a popular holiday destination. And it’s not surprising since it boasts stunning weather, dream-like castles, delicious chocolate, and of course, the Matterhorn. But the country also has its share of mysteries, some more creepy than others.

In the city of Bern, for instance, is a huge fountain sculpture built in 1546 which depicts a giant stuffing a baby into his mouth while carrying a sack filled with three terrified infants over his shoulder. It is one of the oldest fountains in Bern, but no one seems to know why it’s there.

As with all mysteries, there are several theories on why the sculpture, named The Child Eater of Bern or the Kindlifresser, was erected. The first one says that the giant wears a hat similar to the Judenhut that Jews had been forced to wear at the time, which means that the sculpture was possibly meant to be a warning to the Jewish community living in Bern.

Other theories say that the sculpture depicts the Greek Titan, Kronos, who ate all his children to prevent them from succeeding him on the throne. Even another proposes that the giant is the older brother of the founder of Bern, Duke Berchtold. It is believed that he became insane with jealousy because of his younger brother’s successes and eventually collected and ate the town’s children in revenge.^[1]

9 The Split Moon

On June 18, 1178, Gervase of Canterbury—the chronicler of the Abbey of Christ Church—and four other monks witnessed something strange in the sky one hour after sunset. According to Gervase, the upper horn of the crescent moon was split in two. He described the incident in detail, saying, “from the midpoint of the division, a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out, over a considerable distance, fire, hot coals and sparks.” He also added that the moon “writhed, as it were in anxiety” and “throbbed like a wounded snake.”

While it remains unclear what exactly the monks witnessed, at least one astronomer believes that they saw the asteroid impact that led to the creation of the lunar crater Giordano Bruno. However, most astronomers dispute this because of the lack of historical records surrounding the meteor shower that would have been visible after the collision. The working theory, instead, is that the monks would have possibly seen a meteor passing in front of the moon.^[2]

8 Nuclear Spy Device Induces Flood?

In February 2021, the village of Raini in the Indian Himalayas was hit by a massive flood after a glacier collapse caused an avalanche that started in the Nanda Devi mountain range. More than fifty people died in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand.

However, a significant percentage of the population in Raini village doesn’t believe that a glacier collapse caused the flooding. Instead, as generations before them did, they believe that nuclear spy devices hidden in the snow and rocks of the mountains above their village had “exploded” and caused the tragedy.

This is because of a news story that has been circulating for many years about the U.S. collaborating with India in the 1960s to get the world’s best mountain climbers to hide nuclear-powered monitoring devices across the Himalayas. This was to enable them to spy on Chinese nuclear tests. It is said that a group of Indian and American climbers lugged the devices up the mountain but got caught in a blizzard. They scampered back down to safety, leaving the devices on a “platform.” Returning to the mountain the following spring, the devices had vanished. In April 1978, Morarji Desai, then prime minister of India, confirmed that his country and the U.S. planned to plant nuclear devices on Nanda Devi but wouldn’t confirm whether the mission had been successful.

So, where are the devices now? Did they fall down the mountain during a landslide? Are they still up there, causing havoc in the form of avalanches and flooding, or did someone else secretly remove them? Maybe the Yetis have them.^[3]

7 The Clarendon Dry Pile

In 1840, an experimental electric bell named the Clarendon Dry Pile or Oxford Electric Bell was set up. The experiment is made up of two brass bells positioned beneath a dry pile, one of the first form of electric batteries. When the clapper, suspended between the piles, touches one bell, it is charged by one pile and then repelled and attracted to the other bell.

The bell holds the Guinness World Record as the most durable battery in the world and has produced around 10 billion rings since 1840. The dry pile was covered with molten sulfur for insulation when it was set up, and the bell continues to ring today even though it is protected behind two layers of glass and hardly audible anymore.

The mystery here is that no one can explain why this dry pile has lasted for more than 180 years. Experts are reluctant to open the device, because they fear that they would ruin the ongoing experiment. Instead, they are waiting to see if the battery will finally lose its charge or whether the clapper will eventually break from old age.^[4]

6 What Happened to Licorice McKechnie?

When Licorice McKechnie left home as a teenager, she was fully focused on marrying her boyfriend, Bert Jansch. However, the wedding wasn’t to be. Instead, she met musician Robin Williamson, and Jansch traveled to Morocco on his own in 1963. In 1966, McKechnie and Williamson also spent time in Morocco. Later, they recorded music and vocals for the psychedelic folk band, The Incredible String Band, which was formed by Williamson, Clive Palmer, and Mike Heron. McKechnie performed with the band at Woodstock in August 1969.

In 1972, she left the band when her relationship with Williamson ended. She appeared at a Scientology benefit concert in 1974 and shortly afterward moved to California. After divorcing her second husband, musician Brian Lambert, she again joined Williamson and his Merry Band for a performance in 1977.

In 1986, she went back to Edinburgh to see her family, but no one has heard from her since 1990. The last report on her whereabouts came when music journalist, Mark Ellen, wrote in 2000 that McKechnie was last seen hitchhiking across the Arizona Desert in 1987.

In 2019, unconfirmed reports surfaced on Facebook that Licorice McKechnie was alive and living in California. However, these reports remained rumors. Her whereabouts remain unknown, but wild theories have suggested that her connection with Scientology might have led to her disappearance.^[5]

5 Sam the Sandown Clown

In May 1973, two children from the small town of Sandown, located on the east coast of the Isle of Wight, were running and playing in the green hills of the Shanklin & Sandown Golf Club when they heard a siren-like sound emanating from a nearby small bridge. They immediately made their way to the bridge out of sheer curiosity.

To their surprise, a strange being popped out from under the bridge. It seemed that it had been startled by the children and dropped a book it was holding into the stream below the bridge. After retrieving the book, the creature hopped away and entered a metal house of sorts. It returned after a short while, carrying a microphone-like device. Using it, he relayed a message: “Hello, and I am all colors, Sam.”

One of the children asked whether Sam was human, which he denied. The children then asked if he was a ghost, to which he replied, “Well, not really, but I am in an odd sort of way.” Sam expressed fear of humans and being discovered but invited the children into the metal hut. Once inside, he placed a berry in his ear, lunged forward, and caught the berry in his eye socket. He lunged again, and the berry fell into his mouth.

For half an hour, the children spoke with Sam before returning home and relaying their experience to the golf course’s groundskeeper. The groundskeeper laughed it off, which caused the children to wait several weeks before telling their parents. When the area was eventually explored by adults, no sign of Sam or his hut could be found.

The children described him as being over two meters (6.5 feet) tall with a round head too large for his body, very white skin, and paint over his face. When they said he wore a clown suit, Sam was quickly given the nickname of Sam the Sandown Clown. To date, no one else has encountered Sam, and it remains unclear what exactly he was; a creepy human wearing a clown costume or a shared hallucination.^[6]

4 Is the Holy Grail in Spain?

Believed to be the cup that Jesus drank from at the last supper and the same cup that Joseph of Arimathea used to collect Jesus’s blood after he was crucified, the Holy Grail is still the most sought-after Christian relic in modern times.

It has yet to be found, but some believe that the Knights Templars hid it away or that Joseph of Arimathea buried the grail in Glastonbury, England, where the water is said to run red.

In the Valencia Cathedral in Spain stands a relic that many believe is, in fact, the Holy Grail. Twice a year, the small chalice is taken out of a chapel at the back of the cathedral and placed inside the church. Even though the church has never claimed that this chalice is the Holy Grail, many are convinced that it is. This is because the cup is made from stone that can only be found in Israel. And the shape is reminiscent of cups used at Jewish liturgical celebrations.

Whether it will ever be confirmed as the real deal, remains to be seen.^[7]

3 The Strange Case of Heidi Wyrick

When Heidi Wyrick was eight years old, she moved with her parents to Ellerslie, Georgia. Almost immediately, she began speaking of a friendly elderly man named Gordy who came around to see her and play with her in the yard of the new home. Her mother, Lisa, thought Gordy was a new imaginary friend right up until the moment her daughter told her about another person named Con that showed up at the front door in a bloodied t-shirt. Lisa then thought someone had tried to kidnap her daughter and told her husband, Andrew. He then searched the entire neighborhood to try and find the culprit without success.

Shortly after, Lisa’s sister moved in next door, and Lisa happened to mention Gordy and Con. Her sister then told Lisa that James S. Gordy was the former owner of the house she had just bought and that he died in 1974. She had no photographs of Gordy but managed to contact another family who owned the house before Gordy. They confirmed Heidi’s description of Gordy, who said that he wore a suit with shiny black shoes and had gray hair. As for Con, in life, he was Uncle Lon “Con” Batchelor, uncle to Catherine Ledford, who was part of the family that owned the house before Gordy. He died in 1957 and was missing a hand, something that Heidi also knew.

Heidi kept seeing and talking to Gordy and Con for four years. In 1993, Lisa became pregnant, and for the first time, Heidi seemed afraid of a new spirit who had appeared. This one was malevolent. After the baby was born, Lisa noticed scratches on Heidi’s face and drew Andrew’s attention to it. He ignored it as nothing until he woke up two nights later with three claw marks on his body.

Parapsychologist, Dr. William Roll, confirmed that he believed Heidi had genuine para-psychological experiences, but there is no explanation for them. Heidi continues to see dark spirits in her adult life, seeing so many evil specters that she is no longer afraid of them.^[8]

2 The Van Heijst Lights

Christiaan van Heijst got his pilot’s license before getting his driver’s license. Later he would combine his love of flying and his love of photography, capturing images from high up in the sky.

On a 747 flight from Hong Kong to Alaska in 2014, Van Heijst heard air traffic controllers talking to other pilots about earthquakes that had occurred in San Francisco and Chile as well as a volcanic eruption in Iceland.

He was still listening when in the distance, he saw an intense light flash shooting up from the ground beyond the horizon. He took a series of photographs of the faint green so-called “earth-glow,” which could be seen all over the Northern Hemisphere. Twenty minutes later, a deep red glow appeared ahead of the plane. Approaching the lights, they became stronger, lighting up the clouds and sky in the type of orange hue that is usually seen during wildfires. Even stranger, these lights were where only the sea should have been.

While theories include a volcano underneath the surface of the ocean, an official explanation has yet to be provided.^[9]

1 The Disappearance of Kirsa Jensen

On September 1, 1983, 14-year-old Kirsa Jensen from Napier, New Zealand, went horseback riding at a local beach. She never returned home. Her horse, Commodore, was found wandering close to the Tutaekuri River, but there was no trace of the teenager.

The last confirmed sighting of Kirsa placed her and Commodore near a World War Two gun emplacement at the river mouth, where she spoke to a man inside a white utility vehicle. Witnesses who saw her said that her face was bloody and that she was held at arm’s length by a middle-aged European man. In 1985, John Russell confessed to murdering Kirsa but later retracted the confession. He was never charged and eventually committed suicide in 1992.

Search parties failed every time they started up a new search, and psychics and mediums couldn’t help in cracking the case either. Kirsa was never found, and the case remains open.^[10]

Or have they? Mostly, yes. Yes, they have.

People love a good puzzle—take a jigsaw. A few hours spent pawing through various pieces, locating all the corners, and matching up colors and figures, all culminating in a completed picture. Very satisfying. Even if the jigsaw is particularly large or difficult, taking longer than a few hours to complete, the sense of achievement (and maybe relief) is a good feeling.

What if there’s a missing piece? It’s disappointing. It’s infuriating. It can ruin an evening or a holiday or, in extreme cases, a relationship. The entries listed below are all fiendishly difficult puzzles that have located their respective missing pieces. Whether it is by advancements in technology, uncovered evidence, or some good old-fashioned logic and reason, we can all rest easier knowing these conundrums have been solved or, at the very least, demystified.

Related: 10 More Unsolved Coded Mysteries You Could Decipher Today

10 Blue Jets

When cinemagoers watched the White House explode under the concentrated energy weapon of an attacking alien spaceship, most were unaware that Mother Nature produced an eerily similar-looking phenomenon—the “blue jets” or ionospheric lightning. Scientists remained in the dark about the cause of this amazing-looking phenomenon. Well, now we know exactly why this happens…sort of.

This amazing aerial phenomenon is, according to scientists using cameras and X-ray detectors on the International Space Station, an upward projecting lightning flash that’s often 48 kilometers (30 miles) long. The cause? “Blue bangs,” a series of blue-hued rumbling bursts in large thunderstorms. There we go—all done.

Except for the fact that we still don’t have a conclusive explanation for the “blue bangs.”

Torsten Neubert, an atmospheric physicist, has posited a hypothesis; short-ranged electrical discharges coming within a half a mile of each other are the cause. The powerful bursts of current result in producing these “blue bangs,” and thus, the “blue jets.”^[1]

Either that or it’s aliens.

9 How in the Sweet Hell Does the Flimsy-Looking Butterfly Actually Fly?

It’s no mystery how a bird flies. Indeed, the study of such mechanics laid the groundwork for humankind to take to the skies themselves. Butterflies, however, are complicated. They’re more like a piece of crepe paper caught in an updraft. Scientists have considered the problem of how exactly the little bugs manage to fly for a while but have never come to a firm conclusion. That is, until recently.

A team at Lund University, Sweden, decided to test a 50-year-old hypothesis about how the butterfly flies—the “clap” hypothesis. They found that this is indeed how they do it, using some robotic clappers to simulate the wings. It worked.

It turns out that it is not a simple case of slapping their proportionately huge wings together, though. The little insects have very flexible wings, and only the ends clap together. The remaining portion of the wings creates a small “air pocket,” which aids in propulsion and allows for directional flight.^[2]

8 Why Do Japanese Trains Keep Getting Stopped by Millipede Swarms?

Occasionally, up in the forest-covered mountains of Japan, trains are periodically halted in their progress by vast swarms of icky, poisonous millipedes. These events have been recorded as far back as the 1920s, making the phenomenon at least a century old. In 1977, a forestry researcher named Keiko Niijima suggested that it was perhaps a cyclical behavior, speculating that the beasties had an eight-year migratory cycle (similar behavior to that of certain types of bamboo and, more famously, cicadas).

Over 40 years later, this observation has been confirmed as true. As of January 2021, a research team from Shizuoka University has confirmed the eight-year cycle, stating that the migration is due to large broods traveling to new, abundant feeding grounds. Next up—whether the millipedes are planning world domination. In eight years, of course. ^[3]

7 When Did Money Get Invented?

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

This historical head-scratcher has been plaguing academics for centuries. When did people start using money? Well, now we know. Or at least we have a new “earliest date” for items that conform to our modern interpretation of “money.”

Dutch researchers have found that many Bronze Age artifacts—objects shaped like rings, ax blades, and ribs—are mostly the same weight, suggesting that they were interchangeable and used as a form of rudimentary currency. This discovery proves that “money”-oriented commerce was occurring in Europe as far back as 5,000 years ago. Evidence of prehistoric sub-prime mortgages placed on mottle-and-daub huts remains scant. ^[4]

6 45-Year-Old Cold Case Solved

Once again, as with high-profile cases like the Golden State Killer murders and the Bear Brooke murders, the guys and gals at Parabon NanoLabs have uncovered the perpetrator in another cold case. This entry is one of the coldest cases to be solved in the U.S. in recent years.

At the very end of that year, December 27th, 1975, police in Grand Junction, Colorado, uncovered the body of a woman who had been bound, raped, and murdered by strangulation in an apartment complex. Forty-five years later, after the case had gone cold decades before, the police department reached out to Parabon for DNA analysis, hoping to get a genetic profile of the killer.

The tests came back, and after some cross-comparisons with criminal databases, police named Jimmy Dean Duncan as the perp. Duncan, who had been 26 years old in 1975, and was also considered a suspect at the time, died in 1987. So while he can never be brought to justice for the horrific crime, the mystery of who killed Deborah has ended, hopefully granting some peace to her loved ones.^[5]

These cases give us hope that we can see cold cases becoming a rarity. Maybe even a thing of the past.

5 The Ancient Persian Army That Vanished

People go missing all the time. Although a rarer phenomenon, groups of people will also disappear (think the Roanoke colonists vanishing in 1590). The story of King Cambyses II and his army is a little different. In 524 BC, around 50,000 men disappeared in the Egyptian Sahara. It was as though the sands just swallowed them up. In fact, that was the story for thousands of years—the army was tasked with destroying the Oracle of Amun at the Siwa Oasis when a sandstorm enveloped them, burying them all under the desert sands near Luxor.

In 2009, however, a team of Italian archaeologists discovered a mass of bronze artifacts and piles of bones that seemed to indicate the location of the lost army. Had it been true all along—did they indeed all perish in a sudden, unnaturally large sandstorm? They seemed to indicate as much when revealing their discoveries in a documentary film (which is more Ancient Aliens than The Egypt Exploration Society).

According to Egyptologist Olaf Kaper, speaking on the discovery in 2014, no. the remains were found near a ruined fortress that had been the base for an Egyptian rebel leader named Petubastis III. According to Kaper, the army was probably slaughtered in an ambush reminiscent of the Romans’ defeat in the Teutoburg Forest. It is likely that the arrogance of the invading Persians was their undoing, crushed by a rebel force much more used to the environment and spurred by revenge. The myth of the sandstorm was probably the invention of Cambyses’s eventual successor, Darius I, designed to undermine the reputation of his predecessor and bolster his claim over Egypt.

Given the unlikelihood of tens of thousands of people dying in a single sandstorm, and by applying a bit of Occam’s Razor, it is likely that we can put this millennia-old piece of propagandistic mythmaking to bed.^[6]

4 Geometric Problem Solved After 90 Years of Head Scratching

The conjecture in question, made by German mathematician Eduard Ott-Heinrich Keller in 1930, suggests that any tessellation or tiling of Euclidian space by identically sized squares (or hypercubes, when applied to dimensions higher than 2) will always find that two squares will meet face to face. All dimensions, up to the sixth, have been shown to be accurate. The question of the sixth dimension remained too complex to quantify.

That was until a team from Carnegie Mellon University finally crunched the numbers with a bit of help from their computerized pals. After a period of four months of computer programming (and only half an hour to solve the problem), the 90-year-old geometry problem called “Keller’s Conjecture” was solved.

“I was really happy when we solved it, but then I was a little sad that the problem was gone,” said John Mackey, a professor at the university.

Bet you can’t do it again with a pen, a piece of paper, and an abacus, Johnny boy.^[7]

3 Missing Link of the T-Rex Identified

Finding the complete lineage of animals that died millions of years ago is a tough gig—a lot of digging involved, followed by tediously long tests that end up with a result that barely makes a blip on the news cycle. If a “missing link” in human phylogeny was unearthed, the world would lose its frickin’ mind.

But dinosaurs—meh.

Luckily for the team involved in this entry, the dinosaur in question is perhaps the best-known and most-loved genus—Tyrannosaurus rex. News emerged back in 2019 that revealed the link between the Jurassic Park star and an erstwhile discovered small dinosaur called Suskityrannus hazelae. This little beastie, first found in New Mexico 20 years ago, is several million years older than its titanic cousin. It stood at almost 1 meter (3 feet) at the shoulder, considerably smaller than the monster that ate that bloke on the loo (watch the 1st movie, gen Z; it’s the only good one in the series).

Perhaps the most important observation is the similarity in the arm’s length for both species—the (relatively) tiny tyrannosaur displayed the same short forelimbs and strong jaw seen in its more famous descendent. This observation suggests that these traits were adopted while the tyrannosaurs were still relatively small, which makes a hell of a lot more sense.^[8]

2 Literary Puzzle from 1934 Finally Solved…Again

If you’re one of those annoying people who must skip ahead and read the end of a detective novel, unable to wait for the killer to be uncovered by going through the laborious task of “reading like a normal human,” you’ll hate the literary puzzle called “Cain’s Jawbone.”

Penned by Edward Powys Mathers of The Observer newspaper in 1934, the puzzle was a murder mystery novella with none of the pages in order. It was solved in the 1930s by two entrants, each winning the princely sum of £25. Over the decades, Cain’s Jawbone faded into obscurity, and the solution was lost. A copy of the book was donated to Shandy Hall, a museum dedicated to Laurence Stern. The curator was the third person to solve the mystery.

In 2019, the curator worked with crowdfunding publisher Unbound to re-release the puzzle with an offer of £1,000 for anybody who could solve it within a year. Twelve people attempted the Herculean task, with only one person solving it (the fourth person ever). BBC Comedy writer John Finnemore spent four months decoding and solving the fiendishly tough murder mystery. The Laurence Sterne Trust keeps the solution—if you fancy having a go, they are the ones to contact to verify if your answer is right.^[9]

1 Who Was Jacob Klimowsky?

The Nazi theft of artworks, treasures, and artifacts, as well as their penchant for burning books, is well-documented and well-known. What is often overlooked is their destruction of heritage properties and sites. This terrible purging of culture is a hallmark of totalitarian regimes; Mao’s wholesale destruction of Chinese historical sites in order to remold the Chinese people’s idea of national identity is another prime example. The demolition of the Königsberg New Jewish Cemetery in Kaliningrad in 1938 is a lesser-known example of this terrible practice.

The cemetery was opened in 1928, including a beautiful funeral hall designed by noted German architect Erich Mendelsohn. After its destruction, it faded from collective memory, laying as mounds of rubble on a scrubby plot of land for decades. When Jews in East Prussia, a historical society based in Berlin, went to inspect the site in 2010, they discovered something incredible. Among the debris at the site was a single intact gravestone. It belonged to a man named Jacob Klimowsky. The miracle quickly turned into a mystery—members of the society found that nobody could find a record of the man, or even his family name, in the area.

Ten years later, after a good deal of sleuthing, the society located and contacted some of Jacob’s descendants. They had no idea that their ancestor, a WWI veteran on the German side, was buried in Königsberg, much less that his gravestone was the last one left intact. The family provided the society with documents, including photos, of Jacob, allowing them to finally uncover the mystery and help restore this portion of local heritage that was thought to have been destroyed.^[10]

We all have our guilty online pleasures. Be it cute cat videos, makeup tutorials, recipes you’ll never cook, celebrity gossip, and such. For me, I went down the internet rabbit hole and found myself hooked on YouTube videos of volunteer divers solving missing persons’ cold cases.

Using fairly basic equipment like fish finders, they are aiding law enforcement agencies and granting closure to families by bringing their lost loved ones home. While some of these teams may not like being categorized as YouTubers, many of these groups are funded only by YouTube monetization, donations, merch sales, and the occasional reward payment. YouTube is just one means that enables them to finance their amazing work.

Here are ten missing person cases that have been solved by YouTube dive teams.

Related: 10 Times Smartphones And The Internet Saved Lives

10 Jed Hall: Missing since 2018

In the early morning hours of January 22, 2018, 16-year-old Matthew “Jed” Hall was reported missing in Idaho Falls, Idaho. Jed left a note behind indicating that he may attempt suicide; however, a journal was also found detailing plans to run away from home. Despite ongoing searches, his disappearance remained unsolved for over four years. Amazingly, the cold case was solved within 20 minutes by YouTubers Adventures with Purpose (AWP).

“We came into this like we come into all cases,” AWP diver Doug Bishop explained. “We determine if someone is missing and if someone is missing with a vehicle. We specialize in sonar the way that law enforcement doesn’t have the capability. Do we have a cellphone ping, a last known location? Locations that are frequented, etc. That’s how we base the waterways that we need to search, and that’s how we choose those waterways.”

Using a cellphone ping as a starting point, AWP started searching an area of the Snake River. Just 20 minutes later, they were able to locate Jed’s vehicle under about 2.5 meters (8 feet) of water, roughly 68.5 meters (75 yards) away from a boat ramp. The Idaho Falls Police Department later confirmed that they had positively identified that the human remains found in the rear of the vehicle were Jed’s.^[1]

9 Ruth Hemphill: Missing since 2005

Miriam “Ruth” Hemphill, of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was 84 years old when she disappeared on July 22, 2005. Three months earlier, her daughter was found dead, and her death was ruled a suicide. Bill Hemphill told police that his wife Ruth had left a note about their daughter’s death, and he also found a newspaper clipping his wife had cut out concerning a person who drove into a lake.

Bill felt certain that his wife was dead and that she’d driven her car into one of the lakes in the area. Police agreed that this scenario was likely to be correct, but numerous searches were unable to turn up any sign of Ruth or her car.

The case attracted the attention of Jeremy Sides, whose YouTube channel is “Exploring with Nug.” He explained, “I pretty much just went there and just started sonaring the river until I found some cars. We started finding some cars and the third one we found was hers.” He’d found her vehicle in Melton Hill Lake, and when it was pulled out, human remains were located inside.

Sides has said that he just wants to bring some closure to families of cold case victims. “It feels good to be able to help someone. It’s always been in my blood to want to go beyond myself to help somebody else out.”^[2]

8 Nicholas Allen: Missing since 2020

While most of those in law enforcement are more than happy to accept the assistance of the likes of AWP and other volunteer dive teams, sadly, that’s not always the case.

In February 2020, 17-year-old Nicholas Allen disappeared. His cellphone was switched off, so it could not be tracked, but his vehicle was seen in the vicinity of the murky Yadkin River. The family, frustrated by the apparent disinterest of local law enforcement, reached out to AWP. “My gut feeling just keeps telling me he’s in that river… Something bad has happened to him,” Trudy Bernstein, Nicholas’s aunt, said.

Using information provided by the family, AWP used sonar and found the vehicle less than two hours after arriving at the river. However, when they notified local law enforcement of the discovery, the now-viral video shows the officer arriving on the scene displaying an appalling lack of empathy toward the family and outright hostility toward the AWP dive team.

In response to the public backlash, Sheriff Richie Simmons issued an apology to both the family and AWP. Saying in part that the officer’s abrasive attitude was “not empathetic or kind to the family of Nick, and also was not welcoming or appreciative to Adventures with Purpose. Please know that the interaction you had with our investigator does not represent how we train our officers, and his actions are not in accordance with our expectations. There are no excuses for this type of behavior.”^[3]

7 Jan Shupe Smith: Missing since 2021

A Florida family waited ten agonizing months before discovering what happened to 59-year-old Margaret “Jan” Shupe Smith. She went missing on April 2, 2021, driving her little green Kia Soul. The family reached out to AW), who searched for Smith’s car in several bodies of water in the Lakeland area of Polk County.

AWP was about to suspend their search when a Polk County deputy informed them that Smith had been in a minor traffic accident on the day she went missing. This pointed them in the direction of a small retention pond in a new housing development, about a mile from the crash site. Within mere minutes of arriving at the shallow algae-filled pond, Jan’s car was discovered, and a body was located inside. It was hidden just 46 centimeters (18 inches) under the surface of the water.

Smith had gone missing at night, and she reportedly had poor night vision. The neighborhood was also under construction, which could have led to her being confused about her surroundings, causing her to accidentally drive into the unmarked, unfenced pond at the end of an uncompleted road. “This was a tragic accident, and our prayers are with the family,” Polk County Sheriff, Grady Judd, stated. “We’re grateful for Adventures with Purpose working with us in locating the vehicle.”^[4]

6 Timothy Robinson: Missing since 2008

AWP and several other similar dive groups did not initially start out solving cold cases. AWP’s Jared Leisek started his YouTube channel to document his progress toward his goal of diving to pick up 2,000 pounds of trash littering waterways in a three-month timeframe.

The group was doing a live stream of an environmental cleanup project on the Willamette River in Oregon in May 2020 when they pulled the car belonging to missing 56-year-old Timothy Robinson out of the water. Unbeknownst to AWP, Robinson had vanished in November 2008, having left a suicide note saying he intended to drive off a boat ramp. Twelve years later, the live stream was quickly cut when the AWP team realized that the vehicle had human remains inside.

Edward’s niece Jessica was surprised to receive a call from detectives after the discovery and was pleased that the family could finally have some answers 12 years after he disappeared. “Thank you for bringing closure to this family. It’s been a long time, and now he can finally be put to rest. Thank you, and God bless,” she said. ^[5]

5 Brian Goff & Joni Davis: Missing since 2018

Ohio resident 66-year-old Brian Goff was the full-time caretaker of 55-year-old Joni Davis, who had suffered a traumatic brain injury several years earlier. They were last seen leaving a Pizza Hut on June 18, 2018, then they disappeared.

While taking a break from looking into another cold case, Chaos Divers decided to see if they could locate the missing couple. Team member Lindsay Bussick later described how the team found them one mile south of where their cell phone pinged. “When the vehicle came across the sonar, there was no doubt what it was.” Goff and Davis were found in the Ohio River in their submerged Oldsmobile, still strapped in by their seatbelts.

While authorities are unsure exactly how the vehicle ended up in the water, they have confirmed that they have ruled out foul play. Local councilman Jack Regis theorized, “One of them could have had a health problem at that time. Nobody knows that answer, and we’ll never know,” he said. “It’s just a shame, but at least the families got closure finally.”^[6]

4 Carey Mae Parker: Missing since 1991

Young Texan mother of three, Carey Mae Parker, was just 23 years old when she vanished without a trace in March 1991. After more than 30 years, the mystery of her disappearance was finally solved in February 2021, when AWP located her vehicle submerged in the waters of Lake Tawakoni.

The road was closed, and part of the disintegrating vehicle was recovered from the water, matching the description of Parker’s car. AWP returned to the lake several months later and conducted a grid search, recovering the rest of the vehicle, as well as human remains. They also located some items of clothing and a child’s bicycle. Parker’s sister, Patricia Gager, explained that on the day she disappeared, Carey was planning to buy a bicycle for her son’s 6th birthday. “She will still have to be identified through DNA, but I have no other reason to believe [it’s] not her,” she explained.^[7]

7 Samantha Hopper & Her Babies: Missing since 1998

An Arkansas woman, 20-year-old Samantha Hopper, was almost nine months pregnant when she and her two-year-old daughter Courtney were reported missing on September 11, 1998. Hopper was on her way to drop her daughter off before going to a concert in the city of Little Rock when they disappeared.

Chaos Divers and Adventures with Purpose joined forces to bring resolution to the 23-year-old mystery. Using information from the family about Hopper’s habits and schedule, they narrowed down possible locations and split up to search possible locations of interest, scanning different areas of Russellville Lake. Around an hour into the search, they located the vehicle in the lake, submerged in about 3 meters (10 feet) of water.

As the vehicle was being recovered, human remains were found inside. Hopper’s surviving daughter, Dezarae Carpenter, was relieved that her mother and siblings could finally be given a proper farewell. Chaos Divers later posted on Facebook, “while it was gut-wrenching to have to see the tears stream down their faces as they were told the news, it was also incredibly heartwarming to see the smiles on their faces and the weight release from their shoulders knowing they were potentially bringing their loved ones home.”^[8]

2 Erin Foster & Jeremy Bechtel: Missing since 2000

When best friends 18-year-old Erin Foster and 17-year-old Jeremy Bechtel disappeared without a trace on April 3, 2000, the rumor mill in Sparta, Tennesee, went into overdrive. But their families knew that something was terribly wrong. “Just a nightmare, man. Just a total nightmare,” described Erin’s father, Cecil Foster.

Months turned into years, and eventually, Sheriff Steve Page decided to revisit the cold case. Starting over, Page said he came across one piece of paper that changed everything. It was the initial missing person’s report filed by Erin’s family. Details in the report seemed to suggest that authorities had been looking for the missing pair on the wrong side of the county. When Exploring with Nug’s Jeremy Sides expressed interest in the case, Page knew exactly where to send him. Following Page’s hunch, Sides used sonar to scan a section of the Calfkiller River. Just 4 meters (13 feet) below the surface of the water, he located the Pontiac Grand Am driven by Foster.

The car was recovered, and the remains of both Erin and Jeremy were found inside. After over two decades, Sheriff Page was able to tell the families what had become of their children. All indications are that it was just a traffic accident, and they simply ran off the road. “I don’t think I believed it even though he’s got the license plate in his hand,” Erin’s father said.^[9]

1 Janet Farris: Missing since 1992

It turns out you don’t necessarily need any training or even specialist equipment to do this kind of thing. Sometimes all it takes is a little luck and good timing. In British Columbia, Canada, 13-year-old Max Werenka was using his GoPro in Lake Griffen when he and a group of visitors to the lake located a car containing the body of 69-year-old Janet Farris, who was reported missing in 1992.

Farris disappeared while driving from Vancouver Island to a wedding in Alberta. “Two weeks later, we received a phone call from that family in Alberta asking why she never came to the wedding,” Farris’s granddaughter, Erin Farris-Hartley, explained, “So she had actually been missing for two weeks with nobody knowing.”

The GoPro footage that Max provided to the RCMP clearly showed an upside-down car resting on the rocky bottom of the lake. When the vehicle was recovered, authorities finally knew what had happened to Janet. “I think the worst thing was not knowing,” her son, George Farris, explained. “We kind of assumed that maybe she had gone off the road or fallen asleep, or tried to avoid an accident or animal on the road,” he said, adding that “given a sad situation, it’s the best of all outcomes.”^[10]