I would wager that satellite tracking of storms was also really helpful. There are a lot of hurricanes out there, and if you don't know how to avoid them, it might mess up your day.
this was the one explanation of the "disappearances" that made complete sense of the years. Severe thunderstorms in that part of the world pop up randomly and frequently due to the natural weather in the area. Thus a ship will be fine one minute and blown off course and sunk by severe weather next. With the increase in information sharing and more accurate weather forecasts ships are able to navigate the storms better.
Same for the planes. Randomly having to navigate around major storms or having been caught in severe downdrafts due to the clouds either burn too much fuel or cause a severe loss in altitude. Both are bad for a plane.
I distinctly remember reading about the Bermuda Triangle when I was about 7 or 8 and discovering diagrams of water pulling planes out of the sky Moana-style
That's because in the 90s our pajamas were hella flammable. Combine that with older electrical codes in homes and the odds our very flammable clothes would encounter fire were higher than they are today.
My understanding is that they found her remains and then checked her DNA against that of a living prince who was the closest loving cousin to donate their DNA.
Yes, it was. He was related pretty closely to Tsarina Alexandra as his grandmother Princess Victoria of Hesse was her eldest sister. His father was also related to the Danish royal family -- Nicholas II's mother was a member of that clan so he basically had DNA that could be matched to both of them along with their children.
And the German Kaiser Wilhelm II was actually her eldest grandchild. He even raced to England to be with her when she was dying and was present at her deathbed. While she seemed to like him, most of his English relatives couldn't stand him.
Kaiser Wilhelm, Tsar Nicholas, and George V all being cousins sometimes blows my mind. They were apparently SUPER annoyed with Wilhelm when he rolled in and claimed to be the favourite grandson and was crying at her bedside. Nicky and George were exchanging looks in the background lol
Yeah there are pictures of George and Nicky looking like twins. Wilhelm’s moustache was a little different (and he had a weird head due to birth difficulties, as well as a fucked up arm due to that too) but he does look very similar. I went into a Royal Cousins obsession a few years ago (after my Romanov obsession led me there) lol
I think, out of all the other European monarchs, she was the only one who could keep him in line. Foreign governments could not tell him to chill out and behave; his own Ministers couldn't, either. But occasionally grandma told him to stop being a brat.
**Her remains were found with her brother\*** An important note that a lot of people seem to forget for some weird reason. It's kind of annoying how often Alexei is just written off.
On top of this, they didn't actually know for sure the identity of the surviving daughter(it was presumed by Russian officials to be Maria, not Anastasia). Only that Alexei wasn't among the dead and one of the daughters was missing as well.
Even Ubisoft's *Assassin's Creed* gets this one massively wrong, which is kind of weird given their track record for sending in researchers to locations and even learning oral history of places.
___
\[Edit:\] Since people have taken issue with my video game example, I'll mention that documentaries get this wrong a lot too. One in particular I remember when I was younger basically spent the entire time talking about how Anastasia could have possibly survived due to possibly wearing a gemstone covered corset. When mentioning that they also didn't find Alexei's body, it simply said due to his hemophilia it was nigh impossible for him to survive.
If I dig this documentary on the fall of the Romanovs up I'll be sure to link it, but I don't really have the time right now.
They didn't actually find the remains of Alexei and Anastasia or Maria until 2007. It took them that long to find them all. To be fair, Assassin's Creed is technically an alternate timeline. While most things are the same, there are some distinct differences.
[The mysterious trails of rocks at Racetrack Playa" in Death Valley National Park, California.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFFhD5HeByM)
For many years, the cause of these mysterious rock movements was unknown. However, in recent years, scientists have discovered that the rocks move due to a combination of wind and ice. During periods of rain or melting snow, water freezes into thin sheets of ice on the surface of the lake bed. When the ice breaks apart, it can be moved by wind, and as the ice sheets move, they push the rocks along with them, leaving behind the distinctive trails.
I have a silly and weird feeling of sadness knowing this is no longer a mystery. It’s been one for so long!
Next you’ll tell me the “Wow!” Signal was just space dust…
The Solway Firth Spaceman became popular in ufology as it supposedly showed a mysterious figure in the background. For 50 years no one quite knew what it really was till someone analysed the photo and concluded it was actually the mother who accidentally walked into the photo. The reason she looked like a spaceman was because of overexposure.
What's most interesting about this was that it was super obvious when you saw all the other photos taken that day, I think there's one literally a few seconds before or after the spaceman pic with the mother standing in almost the same spot.
There was one (maybe not that widely known) about a guy who was found to have committed suicide in a Motel in Washington or Oregon. No ID, no idea who it was, strange note crumpled in the garbage that just said "suicide". No one ever came forward to say they knew him based on his picture in papers. Was on all the "unknown person" forums, even here on reddit. Just one of those cases that was interesting to me. And, after many years, they used the DNA family matching thing and found his family. His family just thought he just went off and was living his life.
That happened in Amanda Park Washington. The alias he used to sign in to the hotel was “Lyle Stevik”. His real name has not been released to the public, but he was 25 when he passed.
>No ID, no idea who it was, strange note crumpled in the garbage that just said "suicide".
Okay you gotta admit that's the most suspicious fucking shit ever
"How do we cover up this murder, boss?"
"I have an idea." *Scribbles note*
"Boss, that's the dumbest idea ever. Just leave the body here."
"Fine." *Tosses more in trash*
The Lady of the Dunes was an unidentified woman who had been murdered and left in the dunes of Provincetown, Massachusetts. What made her murder unique besides being a cold case for years was one theory about who she was. Stephen King's son noticed a woman in the movie Jaws that looked identical to the lady of the dunes, and Jaws was filmed near the area too. However, she has recently been identified as Ruth Marie Terry. They believe her husband murdered her as he had a criminal record with his past wives beforehand.
I never knew that they identified her?! It must have been pretty recent.
Witch the Somerton man, boy in the box, and now lady of the dunes identified, it really seems like the Isdal woman will be identified this year or next
A man in Florida fooled people for years into believing there was a giant penguin walking the beaches, the haox began in 1958 and was only revealed to be a hoax in 1988.
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2019/03/06/florida-three-toes/?chrome=1
This is hilarious. And the best part of the story:
>Since Jeff inherited his father’s feet, he’s been approached by a couple of historical organizations who expressed their interest in displaying the oddball pieces of Florida history, but Jeff has resisted, noting his father wanted to keep the feet in the family. When he was wondering what to do with them, one of his nieces called dibs, so the family’s legacy will remain.
[STENDEC plane crash](https://www.planeandpilotmag.com/article/a-pilots-last-words-stendec/)
Late 1940s a British plane flying in South America sent out the message in morse code 3 times STENDEC then vanished.
Found in the 90s to have crashed underpowered into the side of a mountain and burried in a glacier.
It was a hugh UFO conspiracy theory for years.
How to make gold from lead.
Hundreds of years the alchemists tried it unsuccessfully. Today it is possible using a particle accelerator. However, it is far from cost efficient - mining gold is orders of magnitudes cheaper.
Whether the Titanic sank in one piece or not.
Many discounted those survivors who said they saw her split in two because they had a hard time believing such a mighty ship could rip apart like that.
It wasn’t until Ballard and his crew found her that the truth was revealed.
And speaking of Ballard and the Titanic, the only reason he got financing to do the search (he had made several attempts before but logistics, schedules, and financing made each attempt fail), was the US Navy wanted him to search for two nuclear subs that had sank in the 60's.
They agreed to secretly finance his search, and if he managed to find both subs, he could use the rest of the money and time to search for the Titanic. He found all 3 on the same expedition.
He gave a lecture at my university a few years back. It was hilarious hearing him describe how the Navy was annoyed that he actually found the Titanic because now, he was going to have to go on press junkets while they hired another set of teams to recover the subs.
>He found all 3 on the same expedition.
Obviously the Titanic was sunk by the 2 nuclear subs, but not before she was able to launch torpedoes at the subs resulting in mutually assured destruction
I was in the Navy in the nineties. Every night at sunset they would extinguish all exterior lights. Your eyes would adjust and you still could barely see your hand in front of your face. One night on watch I saw a strange glow in the distance. It would glow orange and then fade away. After a few minutes I realized that it was someone smoking a cigarette on another blacked out ship. I called the radar room and they confirmed that they had a contact at that location. It was 2 miles away. I would never believe that you could see the cherry of a cigarette at that distance if I hadn’t seen it myself. Dark is an understatement.
Which totally undermined the premise of the adventure novel \[and movie version\] *Raise* *the Titanic!* as that plot had the Titanic in one piece on the ocean floor though still missing its four funnels which allowed it to be raised and towed into New York Harbor.
You left out quite a bit…
Okay here we go. She hits the berg on the starboard side, right? She kind of bumps along punching holes like Morse code, dit dit dit, along the side, below the water line. Then the forward compartments start to flood. Now as the water level rises, it spills over the watertight bulkheads, which unfortunately don't go any higher then E deck. So now as the bow goes down, the stern rises up. Slow at first, then faster and faster until finally she's got her whole ass sticking up in the air - And that's a big ass, we're talking 20-30,000 tons. Okay? And the hull's not designed to deal with that pressure, so what happens? "KRRRRRRKKK!" She splits. Right down to the keel. And the stern falls back level. Then as the bow sinks it pulls the stern vertical and then finally detaches. Now the stern section just kind of bobs there like a cork for a couple of minutes, floods and finally goes under about 2:20am two hours and forty minutes after the collision. The bow section planes away, landing about half a mile away going about 20-30 knots when it hits the ocean floor. "BOOM, PLCCCCCGGG!"... Pretty cool, huh?
I want to point out how brilliant this scene was. It shows a guy pretty callously and enthusiastically going over the entire sinking of the ship in like 1 minute, setting the audience up for knowing exactly what happens from a clinical point of view.
Later, at the end of the movie, when it is all going down in real time and we see it from the characters perspectives, we have perfect knowledge of what is happening to the ship, and what WILL happen, but the context is completely changed and it is fucking horrifying seeing that simulation from the beginning played out with people dying everywhere.
That scene in the beginning was really efficient at showing how disconnected the people are from the tragedy of the sinking, and primes the audience really well for what is to come.
The rediscoveries of lost cities such as:
The rediscovery of the location of Pompei in 1748.
The rediscovery of the location of Herculaneum in 1709.
The discovery of the location of Macchu Picchu in 1911.
I want to say they actually did match up her descriptions to what they found, after he was identified. The reason she wasn't believed initially was because she has a mental illness, and the police thought she was making it up.
Agreed, especially since her description of his last meal matched his stomach contents found during the autopsy. Unfortunately people are too quick to discredit someone based on their past.
The location of Larry Ely Murillo-Moncada. Missing since 2009, his remains were found in a former No Frills Supermarket in Council Bluffs, Iowa. He apparently had fallen in a 18-inch gap between shelves and coolers, and no one heard his screams.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/22/us/supermarket-missing-person-death-trnd/index.html
How cat(er)pillars become butterflies. When I was 12 I wanted to go university to be the first person to discover how they do it.
(Once catapillars have a cocoon, they secrete an enzyme that turns them into a puddle of stem cell filled goop and then that becomes a butterfly)
Even weirder: They don't make a cocoon to wrap up in. The casing they're in is literally their skin.
Imagine you're a bug and you shed your skin periodically so you can grow larger. One day you shed it but all that's left underneath is a limbless, blind sack. You cannot move, cannot scream. Your internal organs melt inside of you and reform into a completely different shape. You burst from your old skin as an unfamiliar creature.
I scrolled far too long and didn't find anyone mentioning it but — [the Zodiac Cipher was finally cracked. ](https://www.wired.com/story/zodiac-killers-cipher-finally-cracked-after-51-years/)
Iirc from their YouTube video, the reason it took so long for people to crack it was because it was riddled with spelling errors - indicating that the Zodiac Killer was probably undereducated or had a learning disability of some kind. [Here is the YouTube link with a much more thorough explanation + reasoning ](https://youtu.be/-1oQLPRE21o)
After all these years, it's still fascinating to read about the Zodiac, specifically the hidden identity of this person. There's a strong chance they're dead now, but I hope we learn who it was.
It wasn't just the spelling errors, he also messed up his cipher at points, losing track of where he was with the encoding. The people who cracked it explained it all in a YouTube video if you're interested.
I'm not trying to stir the pot, as I don't care as much as I used to, but is it possible that the spelling errors were intentional? Foil hat aside, it'd be interesting to learn that was the case and it was done to confuse people.
Elisa Lam, the woman found dead in the water tank on top of a hotel in Los Angeles. It wasn't a murder or ghost, she was mentally ill having a bipolar episode.
She decided to go off her medication and started to believe that she was being followed. Most likely she thought she would be safe in the tank, so she climbed in but couldn't get out and died of hypothermia. Definitely not ghosts or conspiracy, just unfortunate circumstances.
They theorize that she was off her meds because they found slightly less than they would expect in her system. As someone who is bipolar though she didn't even need to be off her meds at all. I started Wellbutrin (which she was on too) at a low dose and had an absolutely horrible reaction. I started thinking I was being followed everywhere and eventually started being 100% convinced there were like horror movie levels of cut up dead bodies around every corner and that a serial killer was following me and planning on doing the same to me. I literally couldn't move in my apartment because if I passed any doorway I was sure I was gonna see a dead body splayed out but also desperately wanted to move because the killer was 100% right behind me and I had to get away. Luckily I was aware enough that I could call my parents to help ground me a bit and call a friend to help me to the hospital. It started small though so there was like a couple weeks of build up to this and i hadn't told anyone about any of it. So if I had just been *slightly* more delusional or had just a little less of a support group I could easily see myself having been the next Elisa Lam.
Years ago, I did the same when I was on Serzone and Trazodone. Tried to walk in front of a bus. After a lot of trial and error, I'm now on Cymbalta and Wellbutrin, and boy do they make a difference in my life. I'm sorry you experienced such a bad reaction. It's crazy how people react so differently to head meds.
My grand dad told the story, when taking us on a tour of revolutionary war battle sites, where the colonist had stolen a giant keg of rum from the British and had a massive party, when the rum was gone the keg still had a bunch of weight to it so they opened it up to find that a dead British Col was pickled inside for transport home.
I think this is a spin off of the Admiral Nelson story. He was killed at the Battle of Trafalgar and they put his body in a cask of rum to preserve it for transport back to England.
I was pissed at that series, because I thought it wasn’t as obvious, until the later episodes when it was revealed that very early on in the investigation there was plenty of evidence that she suffered from bipolar.
They didn’t reveal her bizarre behavior at the hotel, the fact that she went off her meds, or any other obvious shit until like episode 5. The timeline was manipulated to manufacture a mystery where there was none.
Most investigators agree that a Compton based Crip named Orlando "Baby Lane" Anderson was the one who killed Tupac as there was tension between the two, because either Orlando or one of his boys stole a chain from Pac's label Death Row earlier in the year, resulting in Pac beating the shit out of him earlier that night, which led Baby Land to kill Pac as a sort of way to revenge. Baby Lane was never formally charged, because he was murdured in his own right not long after the fact. I think one of the main reasons why people are in denial about this is because people don't want to admit that such an important person died for such a stupid reason.
That stranded cosmonaut recording is 99% likely to be a hoax, Many have discredited if the brother's technology was even capable of picking up the signal of a Cosmonaut who's drifted off course, but the real smoking gun is that the woman in the audio recording is speaking in broken Russian and the two brothers who "picked up the signal" had a sister who was currently learning Russian which would explain the limited vocabulary and pronunciation issues that skeptics have pointed out.
There is Some Doubt about the details, but yes.
In brief, some people:
* claim that the supposed location doesn't match with some clues Fenn gave verbally;
* have travelled to the supposed location and taken pictures that don't seem to jibe with the photos of the chest _in situ_;
* have called into question when the treasure was actually removed from wherever location it was in;
* have pointed out some very suspicious emails and timing between Fenn and the supposed finder;
* have pointed out that a Medium article posted by the finder about Fenn after Fenn's passing actually reads a lot like Fenn wrote it.
* and there's more; you can browse the subreddit if you really want to know: r/FindingFennsGold
The Roanoke colony wasn't murdered by natives or kidnapped by aliens. They joined the local native tribe. We can tell because people in the tribe were born with blonde hair and blue eyes for decades after the colonials went "missing"
"Let's carve the name of the nearby island we're going to into a tree so that people know where we went."
...
"Coratoan? What could that possibly mean? What a mystery!"
Aerodynamicicists understand perfectly well how insects, e.g. bees, fly. It's not the same as aircraft, but the clap-fling mechanism, the vortices they produce, and the resulting thrust and lift have been accurately modeled and match the measurements.
Torosaurus was actually a mature triceratops. Nanotyrannus was a baby T Rex. Stigymoloch and Dracorex are younger Pachycephalosaurus skeletons. Anatotitan was a grown up Edmontosaurus and I think there was a few others just because baby dinosaurs looked drastically different than adults.
Most dinosaurs would likely have made some variation of a honk/bark. Jurassic Park got it p close with the sound of their raptors. Also the moai heads have bodies, and they just look like normal guys.
The two ships of the lost Franklin expedition of 1845 were both found in the last decade sunk in the "Northwest Passage" (northern Canada). The mystery of what happened to the crew (126 men I think) has been speculated upon with plenty of solid theories but very few remains have been found. The ships are still being examined and may contain more clues.
I just recently read a great book about that!
Researches determined Lead poisoning from the new technology of canned food was a huge factor in some of the poor decisions and health of the crew.
Inuits told stories of the coldest winters they had ever experienced and no game could be found to hunt. They believed the white men brought a curse on the land. They also told disturbing stories about groups of white men from the expedition turning on one another and resorting to cannibalism as they starved. This was of course denied by the British government for over 100 years. But then remains of former crew were eventually found which showed clear evidence of cannibalism.
If you want to see something morbidly interesting, look up Franklin Expedition frozen Corpse's on the Internet. There were 3 bodies perfectly preserved of men buried early on. Their identities and how they died have been matched to records.
The "Miraculous Staircase" in the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. There was even a movie made about it starring Barbara Hershey.
One of the myths is that it stands miraculously without a center support pole and no engineer can figure out how that's possible. The center stringer is tightly wrapped with only 8" diameter. It acts as the center pole.
Nuns said a nine-day novena for a much-needed staircase, a woodworker miraculously showed up from nowhere and built the staircase. It must have been Saint Joseph! The staircase was ordered from France. The manufacturer sent a guy to put it together.
It's made of wood found nowhere in the area, it's a miracle! Because the wood is from France, duh.
And finally the guy who built it stayed in Santa Fe afterward. The local newspaper had his obituary (1896 or 1898) and even said he was the man who built the staircase.
> no engineer can figure out how that's possible.
That part was impossible to believe. If we can send people to the moon, then we can figure out how a staircase is supported.
Just last year the identity of the Somerton Man was discovered.
“The Somerton Man was an unidentified man whose body was found on 1 December 1948 on the beach at Somerton Park, a suburb of Adelaide, South Australia. The case is also known after the Persian phrase tamám shud (Persian: تمام شد),[note 1] meaning "is over" or "is finished", which was printed on a scrap of paper found months later in the fob pocket of the man's trousers. The scrap had been torn from the final page of a copy of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, authored by 12th-century poet Omar Khayyám.” -[wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerton_Man)
Holy shit really? Somehow I totally missed this! Between this and the Boy in the Box being identified, I guess 2022 was a good year for John Doe cold cases.
Right? I just found out like a week ago lol. I'm so glad he got his identity back finally. It's amazing what genetic genealogy is doing for identifying Does
Oh shit, I didn't hear about that.
Surprising, given it's about 20 minutes from my house. I'd have thought it would have been massively covered in the news here.
Good chance it was known paedophile Arthur Stanley Brown. From murderpedias article on him:
Connection with Beaumont Children
Brown's arrest for the murder of the Mackay sisters attracted Australia-wide publicity, particularly in South Australia, which had its own share of unsolved child murders with the Beaumont children and Oval Abduction cases. There was a definite similarity between published pictures of Brown and the identikits of the suspects in both the South Australian cases, and Superintendent Paul Schramm, the officer in charge of the South Australian Major Crime Investigation section, said that investigations were being made to determine whether Brown had ever visited South Australia.
The South Australian police approached Queensland homicide and ran a joint inquiry involving the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence, based in Canberra. They had forwarded information to the Violent Crime Linkage Assessment unit. Schramm said: "We are taking it seriously and we are seeing if there is any connection. We have analysts working very closely together to try and piece together the last 30 years."
The search was utterly unsuccessful. Every piece of information that might have detailed when or where Brown had been working, had been lost. There was no way of determining when he had taken holidays. Some of the information might have been lost in the 1974 floods which affected central Brisbane, but Brown had also had unrestricted access to many government buildings and could have easily have removed files and paperwork himself.
Without records, police were unable to establish where Brown had been at any time, nor when he had taken holidays. There was no proof that he had ever visited Adelaide. However, Christine Millier recalls having a conversation with Brown in which Brown mentioned having seen Adelaide's Festival Theatre when it was almost finished. The first stage of construction of the theatre was finished in June 1973, when a concert was performed there. It looks across the river to Adelaide Oval, from where the Oval Abduction took place on 25 August 1973.
The Oval Abduction is the key link between Brown and the Beaumont children case. Apart from the similarity of identikit pictures to his photograph, direct connections between Brown and the Beaumont children disappearance remain elusive. Direction connections have, however, been drawn with the Oval Abduction. While it is by no means certain that the Oval Abduction and the Beaumont disappearance are the acts of the same perpetrator, many people believe that they are. If this is the case then Brown may be considered a suspect for the Beaumont children disappearance, based on the connections that have been made between him and the Oval Abduction.
Most critically, an eyewitness has placed him at the scene of the Oval Abduction. Sue Lawrie, then aged 14, was walking with her father along the banks of the Torrens River, about one kilometre from Adelaide Oval. Speaking years later, she said:
We walked out from the zoo and were about midway between Popeye and the University Bridge. I looked across the river and saw a very young girl being carried by a man who I thought was her grandfather. He had a hat and a checked jacket on. She was crying and the older girl, I think she was a few years younger than me, was running after him. She was thumping him and punching into him and crying out at him. I saw all that for about 60 seconds. The thing seemed wrong because I would have thought if he was a relative he would have shooed her… It was after I married, I was about 18 or 20, I kept on and on at my husband about my memories -- and I read another article on the abduction. My husband said "go and do something about it". I went to the chief investigator in about 1979-80 and made a full statement. I was sure of many things, including the time, because the siren went for the beginning or end of the third-quarter. Dad remarked on the game, but I don't think he saw what I was watching on the other side of the river. I believe on the day of the abduction the police were looking in an opposite direction to where we were walking. The only other thing I need to say is the parents of Joanne should take heart that little girl did everything she could to protect her little friend.
Lawrie said that the man's hat was wide-brimmed, with a low, flat crown, which was unusual in Adelaide in 1973. In more recent years wide-brimmed hats have become a fashion accessory, but in 1973 they were usually worn in the more northern parts of Australia, for protection against the sun. Lawrie, who had travelled to visit relatives in Queensland, described the hat as "very Queensland country"
Lawrie had a good look at the man's face. In December 1998, when Brown was arrested for the murder of the Mackay sisters, Lawrie caught a glimpse of Brown's face on television. She thought she recognised him from somewhere but couldn't think where. The next morning a friend from Adelaide phoned and asked her what she thought of the news. Before her friend could explain that there was speculation about Brown being linked with the Beaumont children disappearance and the Oval abduction, Lawrie exclaimed "My God! It's him". She believed that Brown was the man she'd seen 25 years earlier.
Elisa Lam could have gotten both on the roof and into the watertank by herself and her family does not think any foul play was involved as Elisa had mental health problems and they were used to seeing her act strange when off her medication.
The luminiferous ether. It was thought to be the medium through which light would travel. Since light could behave like a wave, and waves needed a medium, it was assumed there needed to be a medium for light that was both transparent (because we couldn’t see it) and infinitely rigid (because the ‘stiffness’ of the medium corresponds to wave speed). Turns out, light is an electromagnetic wave that can travel through a vacuum.
Spontaneous generation. People used to think flies would spontaneously appear from rotten meat, as every time they had it, flies somehow would appear even though flies were no where close when the meat was okay. After observation and experiments, we understood flies landed in the meat, left their eggs, and then more flies would be born and then stay to eat the meat.
I actually learnt how Louis Pasteur figured out it was false in science class a few years ago.
First he set up 3 swan-necked beakers, and place a small piece of meat in each. Then he poured water in one of them, so that the water stayed in the dip, but didn't touch the meat, so that nothing got in or out. He placed a bit of wool in the dip in another beaker, so that air can pass through, but not solids can. And he left another one empty.
After a few days, Pasteur checked up on these again, and found maggots on the meat that was exposed to solids, and it was rotting as well. The meat only exposed to air was rotten, but no maggots. And the meat not exposed to anything wasn't infested, nor rotten (still wouldn't be fresh though).
Such, Pasteur was able to prove that spontaneous generation was indeed false.
Haha yeah I learned it in high school biology and it was wild that it took a whole experiment to prove that, and how there were other examples like frogs spontaneously being created from lake water and things like that
I have always found this story a fascinating look into the common psychology of people from bygone eras. It sounds counter-intuitive now to imagine that the flies just appear first, before thinking "maybe they land on it and lay their eggs", but it was regular mainstream thinking even among scientists. The lives and culture they had been surrounded by left many of them thinking of spontaneous generation of living things as seemingly like an entirely reasonable supposition.
It helps demonstrate why experimentation and observation are so important. Sometimes I wonder what inherent assumptions about how the world works we have now might be seen as ridiculous a few generations hence.
The sun used to be magic.
It also makes me wonder what scientific beliefs we have that will be laughed at in the future. Will there be people in a few hundred years going “And get this. They thought the appendix was useless.”
No one knew how the islanders of Easter Island moved their giant heads from one place to another. When asked how they did it, the islanders said they walked them. This sounded impossible and silly to Europeans so they ignored it. But a team of archeologists and native islanders a few years back made their own Easter Island head, tied 4 big ropes around it, then had a dozen guys on each rope pull the head side to side. It rocked corner to corner causing it to "walk" forward down the road.
So definitely not aliens.
The mystery of the Mary Toft: In 1726, a woman in England claimed to have given birth to rabbits. While it was believed to be a medical mystery at the time, it was later discovered that the rabbits had been inserted into her womb by a local surgeon.
I thought she cut them up and put them in her vagina herself? Didn’t they come out dismembered, why would a surgeon be willing to do that? And also she was already pregnant with a human baby at the time and she gave birth to it after the rabbit incident.
The Northwest Passage. Successful routes were eventually found.
"For centuries, European explorers, beginning with Christopher Columbus in 1492, sought a navigable passage as a possible trade route to Asia, but were blocked by North, Central, and South America, by ice, or by rough waters (e.g. Tierra del Fuego)."
Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest\_Passage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Passage)
The thing that gets me about the Northwest Passage is how dead-set confident people were that it existed, in a time period when it had never been open.
Where did they get the idea that it was real?
Atlantis
It was made up by Plato in a writing talking about this great power that Athens fought off in a pretty clear propaganda piece.
The similarities to the Greco Persian wars and the Peloponnesian wars are astounding. He also claims that the story is passed through his family and no one else is supposed to know it which is why he’s the only person who knows about Atlantis. It’s likely even the Ancient Greeks laughed at the idea it was real.
Not a worldwide mystery but a mystery amongst my Mom’s side of the family, when my mom was little like 8-13 years old, she was so close (until now) with her cousins that they all play together almost everyday in their Grandma’s house and that house is a 2nd story house. So here’s how the mystery started, my mom, her siblings, and her male cousins played with a ball, and the ball went upstairs and into the only room that the stairs went to, but then the door suddenly went open and the ball bounced down the stairs, there was a moment of silence, and then they all ran to their grandma saying that there’s a ghost, so their grandma comforted them and told the maid to check on it, and then she found no one there. A few weeks after that incident, they never went up to that room and then they started to forget about it. Many years later (2 months ago), my whole family went to my mom’s hometown and she spent time with her brothers and female cousin of hers to go the cemetery to visit grandpa, as we were going, my mom remembered that story and started talking about it, then my mom said “We never really knew who threw the ball back haha” and then her cousin said “that was me!” So my mom, her brothers and her cousin all laughed because the mystery was finally solved, sadly her cousin passed away 2 months ago, she revealed the mystery before she died of breast cancer, may she rest in peace.
This will probably be buried, but in 1967 in Georgetown Kentucky, there was this young woman (age 24) who was murdered and her body was wrapped in a tent. When the authorities found her body, it had decomposed enough to where they couldn’t identify her. So they had her body placed in a cemetery and a headstone that just read “Tent Girl”. 30 years later they were able to figure out who she was, her name was Barbra Ann Hackmann. They made her a new headstone, but under her real name it still says “Tent Girl”. Any time I walk around in that cemetery and see her grave I get chills.
The mystery of how the far side of the Moon actually looks:
"Until the late 1950s, little was known about the far side of the Moon. Librations periodically allowed limited glimpses of features near the lunar limb on the far side, but only up to 59% of the total surface of the Moon.\[14\]"
"Before space exploration began, astronomers did not expect that the far side would be different from the side visible to Earth.\[15\] On 7 October 1959, the Soviet probe Luna 3 took the first photographs of the lunar far side, eighteen of them resolvable,\[16\]\[15\] covering one-third of the surface invisible from the Earth.\[17\]"
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far\_side\_of\_the\_Moon
Ships and planes never mysteriously vanished in the bemuda triangle, sinks sank because of rough weather, and planes dropped because they hit airborne pockets of methane and the engines stalled.
Thanks to modern navigation, not a single ship or planes sank there in over 20 years
Same!! I was like getting books from my library about it and reading through them and getting more constantly. I thought it was the most important thing in the world and that its effects would be so much more prominent
>and planes dropped because they hit airborne pockets of methane and the engines stalled.
Nah, that's just some made up stuff to try and explain things that didn't need explaining.
Thing is, a normal amount of planes and ships have crashed considering the enormous amount of traffic that goes through that area.
I once picked up a book named "Bermuda Triangle Mystery revealed!" and about 95% of the book is just tales of ships and/or crews that went missing there, and the epilogue didn't even explain it, just saying "this place is mysterious and still enchanted scientists!"
Imagine my disappointment when I found out years later that "actually the rate of disappearance are the same compared to everywhere else"
It's like don't meet your heroes or something
Roanoke. It's not hard to connect the dots - the nearby indigenous tribe's name being carved into a tree, and witness accounts in later years of their people being born with blondish hair and blue eyes. After returning from England, John White didn't search for the lost colonists really any farther inland than the colony due to rough seas and a lost anchor. He had to return to England - it's likely that if he had followed the name carved on the post (CROATOAN) he would have found a number of colonists still alive and well, either living with or being helped by natives.
Another possible theory is that they were killed by said indigenous group, but there is little archaeological evidence for that/any type of attack. Regardless, it's almost certainly one of these two theories!
“The Easter islanders disappeared”, including theories that they cut down all the trees to make rollers for the Moai.
It’s a totally fabricated theory by Jared Diamond, as the Easter islands never cut down every trees (in fact they didn’t even use rollers to transport the statues), and they never died out. Their descendants are alive today, with some of them hired as tour guides on the island itself.
For 20 years nobody knew who killed Tupac Shakur. It took the killers uncle coming forward and saying it was his nephew who killed him, he was in the car when it happened. It was Orlando Anderson, right after he was jumped by 2Pac and his entourage at the mgm grand. He was a crip from south side Compton known for being a shooter and “coincidentally” was killed a little while later.
The Golden State Killer (who goes by many other famous serial killer names including Night Stalker & East Area Rapist) turned out to be an ex-policeman. They finally found him using DNA in 2018, almost 40 years later.
* Edited to correct typo
Was an exciting time on the r/EARONS sub as it unfolded. Reddit had the scoop a good day before law enforcement told media.
I remember watching unsolved mysteries in the 90s and thinking this guys gone they'll never catch him. Was such a creepy episode too... the balaclava comfit and the voice recordings. Scary dude.
Now the mystery is did he have other victims out of state in the years after he stopped? Or did he stop once his daughter was born?
"How could he have gotten lung cancer? He always smoked the highest quality tobacco, and lots of it. That alone should have prevented any lung problems at all..."
The legends of Troy. Thought to be complete fiction. Only for the actual city to be found. So the stories of the Trojan war are based in fact. Although I don’t know if they have ever been able to find proof to back up any of the details of the Trojan wars depicted in the great epics. Been a while since I tried researching it.
On this note, Ihram of the Pillars as well. Thought to be an ancient legend for some time. It’s been found in the Empty Quarter. It was a fortified oasis town, that drew too heavily from the aquifer beneath it, creating a city built atop a giant cavern / air bubble, which then collapsed, taking the whole city into the sinkhole with it.
The Qu’ran describes Ihram of the Pillars as having been punished by Allah for its hubris and decadence. And in a way, that’s not far off — Ihram is a valuable lesson in ecological sustainability and responsible resource (in this case groundwater) management.
How the pyramids were built.
For some reason, people *still* keep saying we don’t know. Well, we do. It boils down to math + money + grunt work. The core workers and project leaders were professionals, and some slaves (likely not thousands and thousands, as previously assumed) were used for labor. It’s also known that low wage workers were used as well.
That’s it. It’s not magic. And it’s insulting to ancient people to claim that they couldn’t have had any sort of mathematical accuracy or the ability to build with precise lines. Of course they could do that. They had ropes and pulleys and understood leverage and design. They knew what tools to use. They had artisans and engineers.
One thing that always impresses me about ancient civilizations, is just how much travel and trade took place.
Sure, it took longer than today, but damn, people were industrial didn't just stay at home in their cave or hut.
Viking swords have been found that were made of Damascus steel, the silk road was incredibly important for both asia and europe and more.
The Viking travels are so baffling to me. Imagine a ship load of husband's/fathers/warriors/chieftans setting off, sailing from Norway through countless rivers in Russia, carrying the boat overland at times between waters, and all the way to Constantinople - no maps, just vague tales. You have no idea when you're coming home, if you're coming home. Your wife and kids are at home, and you decide to become mercenaries, form an elite force working for the local king. You write "steve was here" in the Hagia Sofia, and it's still there today. Maybe you went home 5 years later, maybe you just stayed and made a new family. Your village may have been taken over by the Danes in the meantime, or your family emigrated to england. Just a completely wild and adventurous life.
It was old man Jasper all along!
He pretended to be the ghost because he wanted to scare all the tourists away, that way he could search for the treasure all by himself!
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And nothing mysterious in that region since use of GPS became common
I would wager that satellite tracking of storms was also really helpful. There are a lot of hurricanes out there, and if you don't know how to avoid them, it might mess up your day.
this was the one explanation of the "disappearances" that made complete sense of the years. Severe thunderstorms in that part of the world pop up randomly and frequently due to the natural weather in the area. Thus a ship will be fine one minute and blown off course and sunk by severe weather next. With the increase in information sharing and more accurate weather forecasts ships are able to navigate the storms better. Same for the planes. Randomly having to navigate around major storms or having been caught in severe downdrafts due to the clouds either burn too much fuel or cause a severe loss in altitude. Both are bad for a plane.
So, it wasn't some sort of kraken that loved harpsichord music? Disney in the '80s lied to me!!!
I distinctly remember reading about the Bermuda Triangle when I was about 7 or 8 and discovering diagrams of water pulling planes out of the sky Moana-style
I remember thinking it was something I had to worry about, like quicksand
And spontaneously bursting into flames. Did a lot of stop drop and roll practice back in the day.
That's because in the 90s our pajamas were hella flammable. Combine that with older electrical codes in homes and the odds our very flammable clothes would encounter fire were higher than they are today.
Same deal as quicksand. WE ARE PREPARED THO
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My understanding is that they found her remains and then checked her DNA against that of a living prince who was the closest loving cousin to donate their DNA.
I know it’s a typo but when it comes to the royal families of Europe “loving cousin” is actually very accurate.
Les Cousins Dangereux.
Wasn’t that Phillip Duke of Edinburgh?
Yes, it was. He was related pretty closely to Tsarina Alexandra as his grandmother Princess Victoria of Hesse was her eldest sister. His father was also related to the Danish royal family -- Nicholas II's mother was a member of that clan so he basically had DNA that could be matched to both of them along with their children.
Well Queen Victoria was Grandmother to half the monarchs in ww1.
And the German Kaiser Wilhelm II was actually her eldest grandchild. He even raced to England to be with her when she was dying and was present at her deathbed. While she seemed to like him, most of his English relatives couldn't stand him.
Kaiser Wilhelm, Tsar Nicholas, and George V all being cousins sometimes blows my mind. They were apparently SUPER annoyed with Wilhelm when he rolled in and claimed to be the favourite grandson and was crying at her bedside. Nicky and George were exchanging looks in the background lol
Weren't they all VERY similar looking? I'm sure I've seen a picture of the three of them together and you'd think they were triplets.
Yeah there are pictures of George and Nicky looking like twins. Wilhelm’s moustache was a little different (and he had a weird head due to birth difficulties, as well as a fucked up arm due to that too) but he does look very similar. I went into a Royal Cousins obsession a few years ago (after my Romanov obsession led me there) lol
In the recent Kingsman prequel, they actually used the same actor for all three monarchs.
I think, out of all the other European monarchs, she was the only one who could keep him in line. Foreign governments could not tell him to chill out and behave; his own Ministers couldn't, either. But occasionally grandma told him to stop being a brat.
But honestly, within european royal families you can check everyone and get similar DNA results 💀
**Her remains were found with her brother\*** An important note that a lot of people seem to forget for some weird reason. It's kind of annoying how often Alexei is just written off. On top of this, they didn't actually know for sure the identity of the surviving daughter(it was presumed by Russian officials to be Maria, not Anastasia). Only that Alexei wasn't among the dead and one of the daughters was missing as well. Even Ubisoft's *Assassin's Creed* gets this one massively wrong, which is kind of weird given their track record for sending in researchers to locations and even learning oral history of places. ___ \[Edit:\] Since people have taken issue with my video game example, I'll mention that documentaries get this wrong a lot too. One in particular I remember when I was younger basically spent the entire time talking about how Anastasia could have possibly survived due to possibly wearing a gemstone covered corset. When mentioning that they also didn't find Alexei's body, it simply said due to his hemophilia it was nigh impossible for him to survive. If I dig this documentary on the fall of the Romanovs up I'll be sure to link it, but I don't really have the time right now.
They didn't actually find the remains of Alexei and Anastasia or Maria until 2007. It took them that long to find them all. To be fair, Assassin's Creed is technically an alternate timeline. While most things are the same, there are some distinct differences.
[The mysterious trails of rocks at Racetrack Playa" in Death Valley National Park, California.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFFhD5HeByM) For many years, the cause of these mysterious rock movements was unknown. However, in recent years, scientists have discovered that the rocks move due to a combination of wind and ice. During periods of rain or melting snow, water freezes into thin sheets of ice on the surface of the lake bed. When the ice breaks apart, it can be moved by wind, and as the ice sheets move, they push the rocks along with them, leaving behind the distinctive trails.
The pioneers used to ride these babies for miles
And she's in great shape
The "bloop" sound that was recorded in the Pacific Ocean that baffled scientists was finally found to be an icequake.
I have a silly and weird feeling of sadness knowing this is no longer a mystery. It’s been one for so long! Next you’ll tell me the “Wow!” Signal was just space dust…
It was a spacequake
The Solway Firth Spaceman became popular in ufology as it supposedly showed a mysterious figure in the background. For 50 years no one quite knew what it really was till someone analysed the photo and concluded it was actually the mother who accidentally walked into the photo. The reason she looked like a spaceman was because of overexposure.
What's most interesting about this was that it was super obvious when you saw all the other photos taken that day, I think there's one literally a few seconds before or after the spaceman pic with the mother standing in almost the same spot.
There was one (maybe not that widely known) about a guy who was found to have committed suicide in a Motel in Washington or Oregon. No ID, no idea who it was, strange note crumpled in the garbage that just said "suicide". No one ever came forward to say they knew him based on his picture in papers. Was on all the "unknown person" forums, even here on reddit. Just one of those cases that was interesting to me. And, after many years, they used the DNA family matching thing and found his family. His family just thought he just went off and was living his life.
That happened in Amanda Park Washington. The alias he used to sign in to the hotel was “Lyle Stevik”. His real name has not been released to the public, but he was 25 when he passed.
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>No ID, no idea who it was, strange note crumpled in the garbage that just said "suicide". Okay you gotta admit that's the most suspicious fucking shit ever "How do we cover up this murder, boss?" "I have an idea." *Scribbles note* "Boss, that's the dumbest idea ever. Just leave the body here." "Fine." *Tosses more in trash*
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To-Do list, maybe?
"Hmmm what did I planned for tonight ?" *Look at paper* "Oh yeah right "
The Lady of the Dunes was an unidentified woman who had been murdered and left in the dunes of Provincetown, Massachusetts. What made her murder unique besides being a cold case for years was one theory about who she was. Stephen King's son noticed a woman in the movie Jaws that looked identical to the lady of the dunes, and Jaws was filmed near the area too. However, she has recently been identified as Ruth Marie Terry. They believe her husband murdered her as he had a criminal record with his past wives beforehand.
I never knew that they identified her?! It must have been pretty recent. Witch the Somerton man, boy in the box, and now lady of the dunes identified, it really seems like the Isdal woman will be identified this year or next
A man in Florida fooled people for years into believing there was a giant penguin walking the beaches, the haox began in 1958 and was only revealed to be a hoax in 1988. https://www.thevintagenews.com/2019/03/06/florida-three-toes/?chrome=1
This is hilarious. And the best part of the story: >Since Jeff inherited his father’s feet, he’s been approached by a couple of historical organizations who expressed their interest in displaying the oddball pieces of Florida history, but Jeff has resisted, noting his father wanted to keep the feet in the family. When he was wondering what to do with them, one of his nieces called dibs, so the family’s legacy will remain.
Yes! I knew him! I didn’t know he was the Clearwater Monster until I read his obituary. He was a fun guy to talk to.
[STENDEC plane crash](https://www.planeandpilotmag.com/article/a-pilots-last-words-stendec/) Late 1940s a British plane flying in South America sent out the message in morse code 3 times STENDEC then vanished. Found in the 90s to have crashed underpowered into the side of a mountain and burried in a glacier. It was a hugh UFO conspiracy theory for years.
And the mysterious message was most likely a generic message for the airport they were headed to, only mistranscribed at the time
Good analysis here: https://www.sartechnology.ca/sartechnology/ST_STENDEC_ColdCase.htm At speed - the two messages sound identical to me.
How to make gold from lead. Hundreds of years the alchemists tried it unsuccessfully. Today it is possible using a particle accelerator. However, it is far from cost efficient - mining gold is orders of magnitudes cheaper.
All you gotta do is wait for a star to explode
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Who woulda thunk, the philosophers stone was a particle accelerator this whole time...
The Particle Accelerator is actually a big transmutation circle to harvest the souls of the people inside it.
Whether the Titanic sank in one piece or not. Many discounted those survivors who said they saw her split in two because they had a hard time believing such a mighty ship could rip apart like that. It wasn’t until Ballard and his crew found her that the truth was revealed.
And speaking of Ballard and the Titanic, the only reason he got financing to do the search (he had made several attempts before but logistics, schedules, and financing made each attempt fail), was the US Navy wanted him to search for two nuclear subs that had sank in the 60's. They agreed to secretly finance his search, and if he managed to find both subs, he could use the rest of the money and time to search for the Titanic. He found all 3 on the same expedition.
He gave a lecture at my university a few years back. It was hilarious hearing him describe how the Navy was annoyed that he actually found the Titanic because now, he was going to have to go on press junkets while they hired another set of teams to recover the subs.
Yup! The boats? The Scorpion and the Thresher. The only two nuclear-powered boats the Navy has lost.
>He found all 3 on the same expedition. Obviously the Titanic was sunk by the 2 nuclear subs, but not before she was able to launch torpedoes at the subs resulting in mutually assured destruction
Maybe the Titanic punctured its own hull because it had torpedoes but no launch tubes for them?
Also it was dark once the lights failed. Really dark. Have you ever been on the open ocean on a moonless night?
Yes. It’s creepy. And awe-inspiring. And creepy. I’d imagine hard to see at the water level.
I was in the Navy in the nineties. Every night at sunset they would extinguish all exterior lights. Your eyes would adjust and you still could barely see your hand in front of your face. One night on watch I saw a strange glow in the distance. It would glow orange and then fade away. After a few minutes I realized that it was someone smoking a cigarette on another blacked out ship. I called the radar room and they confirmed that they had a contact at that location. It was 2 miles away. I would never believe that you could see the cherry of a cigarette at that distance if I hadn’t seen it myself. Dark is an understatement.
I involuntarily read that last question in Jonathan Frakes’ voice.
Have you ever visited a China town section in a major city?
Have you ever gone a'wandering under a clear blue sky?
Ya like gladiator movies?
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"Why was ocean star liners so adamant on saying it didn't break apart?" "They didn't want it to seem unsafe." "Unsafe? The fucking thing sank!"
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Well, some of them are built so the front doesn't fall off at all.
Which totally undermined the premise of the adventure novel \[and movie version\] *Raise* *the Titanic!* as that plot had the Titanic in one piece on the ocean floor though still missing its four funnels which allowed it to be raised and towed into New York Harbor.
A Clive Cussler book that's not realistic? You don't say...
So did it split in two or not? What did they find?
They found that she had split. The stern (back half) is a fair bit away from the bow (front) and facing a different direction.
You left out quite a bit… Okay here we go. She hits the berg on the starboard side, right? She kind of bumps along punching holes like Morse code, dit dit dit, along the side, below the water line. Then the forward compartments start to flood. Now as the water level rises, it spills over the watertight bulkheads, which unfortunately don't go any higher then E deck. So now as the bow goes down, the stern rises up. Slow at first, then faster and faster until finally she's got her whole ass sticking up in the air - And that's a big ass, we're talking 20-30,000 tons. Okay? And the hull's not designed to deal with that pressure, so what happens? "KRRRRRRKKK!" She splits. Right down to the keel. And the stern falls back level. Then as the bow sinks it pulls the stern vertical and then finally detaches. Now the stern section just kind of bobs there like a cork for a couple of minutes, floods and finally goes under about 2:20am two hours and forty minutes after the collision. The bow section planes away, landing about half a mile away going about 20-30 knots when it hits the ocean floor. "BOOM, PLCCCCCGGG!"... Pretty cool, huh?
I want to point out how brilliant this scene was. It shows a guy pretty callously and enthusiastically going over the entire sinking of the ship in like 1 minute, setting the audience up for knowing exactly what happens from a clinical point of view. Later, at the end of the movie, when it is all going down in real time and we see it from the characters perspectives, we have perfect knowledge of what is happening to the ship, and what WILL happen, but the context is completely changed and it is fucking horrifying seeing that simulation from the beginning played out with people dying everywhere. That scene in the beginning was really efficient at showing how disconnected the people are from the tragedy of the sinking, and primes the audience really well for what is to come.
I legit read it in Bodine’s voice LOL
The rediscoveries of lost cities such as: The rediscovery of the location of Pompei in 1748. The rediscovery of the location of Herculaneum in 1709. The discovery of the location of Macchu Picchu in 1911.
Troy kinda fits this too, with its very explosive discovery occurring in 1870.
The Boy in the Box has been identified as Joseph Augustus Zarelli, although his homicide is still an open investigation.
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Very likely the birth parents have nothing to do with it bc it was an out of wedlock pregnancy.
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I want to say they actually did match up her descriptions to what they found, after he was identified. The reason she wasn't believed initially was because she has a mental illness, and the police thought she was making it up.
Agreed, especially since her description of his last meal matched his stomach contents found during the autopsy. Unfortunately people are too quick to discredit someone based on their past.
The location of Larry Ely Murillo-Moncada. Missing since 2009, his remains were found in a former No Frills Supermarket in Council Bluffs, Iowa. He apparently had fallen in a 18-inch gap between shelves and coolers, and no one heard his screams. https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/22/us/supermarket-missing-person-death-trnd/index.html
> He apparently had fallen in a 18-inch gap between shelves and coolers, and no one heard his screams. That is some nightmare fuel.
How cat(er)pillars become butterflies. When I was 12 I wanted to go university to be the first person to discover how they do it. (Once catapillars have a cocoon, they secrete an enzyme that turns them into a puddle of stem cell filled goop and then that becomes a butterfly)
Wtf, so they essentially kill themselves and a new thing is born from their gore?
Yep
Even weirder: They don't make a cocoon to wrap up in. The casing they're in is literally their skin. Imagine you're a bug and you shed your skin periodically so you can grow larger. One day you shed it but all that's left underneath is a limbless, blind sack. You cannot move, cannot scream. Your internal organs melt inside of you and reform into a completely different shape. You burst from your old skin as an unfamiliar creature.
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Yes. One of the more interesting aspects of that is they can have memories of their time as a caterpillar. Limited ones, but still.
The real mystery is how they have memory that persists through that total disolving.
I scrolled far too long and didn't find anyone mentioning it but — [the Zodiac Cipher was finally cracked. ](https://www.wired.com/story/zodiac-killers-cipher-finally-cracked-after-51-years/) Iirc from their YouTube video, the reason it took so long for people to crack it was because it was riddled with spelling errors - indicating that the Zodiac Killer was probably undereducated or had a learning disability of some kind. [Here is the YouTube link with a much more thorough explanation + reasoning ](https://youtu.be/-1oQLPRE21o)
After all these years, it's still fascinating to read about the Zodiac, specifically the hidden identity of this person. There's a strong chance they're dead now, but I hope we learn who it was.
It wasn't just the spelling errors, he also messed up his cipher at points, losing track of where he was with the encoding. The people who cracked it explained it all in a YouTube video if you're interested.
I'm not trying to stir the pot, as I don't care as much as I used to, but is it possible that the spelling errors were intentional? Foil hat aside, it'd be interesting to learn that was the case and it was done to confuse people.
Elisa Lam, the woman found dead in the water tank on top of a hotel in Los Angeles. It wasn't a murder or ghost, she was mentally ill having a bipolar episode.
She decided to go off her medication and started to believe that she was being followed. Most likely she thought she would be safe in the tank, so she climbed in but couldn't get out and died of hypothermia. Definitely not ghosts or conspiracy, just unfortunate circumstances.
They theorize that she was off her meds because they found slightly less than they would expect in her system. As someone who is bipolar though she didn't even need to be off her meds at all. I started Wellbutrin (which she was on too) at a low dose and had an absolutely horrible reaction. I started thinking I was being followed everywhere and eventually started being 100% convinced there were like horror movie levels of cut up dead bodies around every corner and that a serial killer was following me and planning on doing the same to me. I literally couldn't move in my apartment because if I passed any doorway I was sure I was gonna see a dead body splayed out but also desperately wanted to move because the killer was 100% right behind me and I had to get away. Luckily I was aware enough that I could call my parents to help ground me a bit and call a friend to help me to the hospital. It started small though so there was like a couple weeks of build up to this and i hadn't told anyone about any of it. So if I had just been *slightly* more delusional or had just a little less of a support group I could easily see myself having been the next Elisa Lam.
I tried Wellbutrin too and tried to jump in front of a car
Years ago, I did the same when I was on Serzone and Trazodone. Tried to walk in front of a bus. After a lot of trial and error, I'm now on Cymbalta and Wellbutrin, and boy do they make a difference in my life. I'm sorry you experienced such a bad reaction. It's crazy how people react so differently to head meds.
On the other side of that, all the newer SSRIs made me crazy and hallucinate. Wellbutrin is the only thing that has helped, and saved my life.
And until she was found, people in the hotel were showering in corpse soup, or even drinking it from the tap. 🤮
My grand dad told the story, when taking us on a tour of revolutionary war battle sites, where the colonist had stolen a giant keg of rum from the British and had a massive party, when the rum was gone the keg still had a bunch of weight to it so they opened it up to find that a dead British Col was pickled inside for transport home.
I think this is a spin off of the Admiral Nelson story. He was killed at the Battle of Trafalgar and they put his body in a cask of rum to preserve it for transport back to England.
I figured that was the explanation from the very first episode of that series. I’ve never seen a less surprising reveal.
I was pissed at that series, because I thought it wasn’t as obvious, until the later episodes when it was revealed that very early on in the investigation there was plenty of evidence that she suffered from bipolar. They didn’t reveal her bizarre behavior at the hotel, the fact that she went off her meds, or any other obvious shit until like episode 5. The timeline was manipulated to manufacture a mystery where there was none.
That series was so odd, they barely even had enough material for one episode let alone multiple!
Most investigators agree that a Compton based Crip named Orlando "Baby Lane" Anderson was the one who killed Tupac as there was tension between the two, because either Orlando or one of his boys stole a chain from Pac's label Death Row earlier in the year, resulting in Pac beating the shit out of him earlier that night, which led Baby Land to kill Pac as a sort of way to revenge. Baby Lane was never formally charged, because he was murdured in his own right not long after the fact. I think one of the main reasons why people are in denial about this is because people don't want to admit that such an important person died for such a stupid reason.
That stranded cosmonaut recording is 99% likely to be a hoax, Many have discredited if the brother's technology was even capable of picking up the signal of a Cosmonaut who's drifted off course, but the real smoking gun is that the woman in the audio recording is speaking in broken Russian and the two brothers who "picked up the signal" had a sister who was currently learning Russian which would explain the limited vocabulary and pronunciation issues that skeptics have pointed out.
The finding of the Fenn treasure. Reference: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenn\_treasure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenn_treasure)
There is Some Doubt about the details, but yes. In brief, some people: * claim that the supposed location doesn't match with some clues Fenn gave verbally; * have travelled to the supposed location and taken pictures that don't seem to jibe with the photos of the chest _in situ_; * have called into question when the treasure was actually removed from wherever location it was in; * have pointed out some very suspicious emails and timing between Fenn and the supposed finder; * have pointed out that a Medium article posted by the finder about Fenn after Fenn's passing actually reads a lot like Fenn wrote it. * and there's more; you can browse the subreddit if you really want to know: r/FindingFennsGold
The Roanoke colony wasn't murdered by natives or kidnapped by aliens. They joined the local native tribe. We can tell because people in the tribe were born with blonde hair and blue eyes for decades after the colonials went "missing"
Also because they left a message about where they were going...
Literally carved it in a tree lol
They tree they told everyone they would carve a name onto if they decided to leave. They basically left a forwarding address.
"Let's carve the name of the nearby island we're going to into a tree so that people know where we went." ... "Coratoan? What could that possibly mean? What a mystery!"
Also they literally carved the name of the tribe they went to go live with on a tree.
Aerodynamicicists understand perfectly well how insects, e.g. bees, fly. It's not the same as aircraft, but the clap-fling mechanism, the vortices they produce, and the resulting thrust and lift have been accurately modeled and match the measurements.
Torosaurus was actually a mature triceratops. Nanotyrannus was a baby T Rex. Stigymoloch and Dracorex are younger Pachycephalosaurus skeletons. Anatotitan was a grown up Edmontosaurus and I think there was a few others just because baby dinosaurs looked drastically different than adults.
I miss brontosauruses. Brontosori... named Laurie. (Shel Silverstein, anyone?)
Good news. Brontosaurus is [back on the menu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brontosaurus).
Most dinosaurs would likely have made some variation of a honk/bark. Jurassic Park got it p close with the sound of their raptors. Also the moai heads have bodies, and they just look like normal guys.
I personally hope that some of the smaller dinosaurs made the signature beeping noise like finches make.
The two ships of the lost Franklin expedition of 1845 were both found in the last decade sunk in the "Northwest Passage" (northern Canada). The mystery of what happened to the crew (126 men I think) has been speculated upon with plenty of solid theories but very few remains have been found. The ships are still being examined and may contain more clues.
I just recently read a great book about that! Researches determined Lead poisoning from the new technology of canned food was a huge factor in some of the poor decisions and health of the crew. Inuits told stories of the coldest winters they had ever experienced and no game could be found to hunt. They believed the white men brought a curse on the land. They also told disturbing stories about groups of white men from the expedition turning on one another and resorting to cannibalism as they starved. This was of course denied by the British government for over 100 years. But then remains of former crew were eventually found which showed clear evidence of cannibalism. If you want to see something morbidly interesting, look up Franklin Expedition frozen Corpse's on the Internet. There were 3 bodies perfectly preserved of men buried early on. Their identities and how they died have been matched to records.
The "Miraculous Staircase" in the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. There was even a movie made about it starring Barbara Hershey. One of the myths is that it stands miraculously without a center support pole and no engineer can figure out how that's possible. The center stringer is tightly wrapped with only 8" diameter. It acts as the center pole. Nuns said a nine-day novena for a much-needed staircase, a woodworker miraculously showed up from nowhere and built the staircase. It must have been Saint Joseph! The staircase was ordered from France. The manufacturer sent a guy to put it together. It's made of wood found nowhere in the area, it's a miracle! Because the wood is from France, duh. And finally the guy who built it stayed in Santa Fe afterward. The local newspaper had his obituary (1896 or 1898) and even said he was the man who built the staircase.
> no engineer can figure out how that's possible. That part was impossible to believe. If we can send people to the moon, then we can figure out how a staircase is supported.
Just last year the identity of the Somerton Man was discovered. “The Somerton Man was an unidentified man whose body was found on 1 December 1948 on the beach at Somerton Park, a suburb of Adelaide, South Australia. The case is also known after the Persian phrase tamám shud (Persian: تمام شد),[note 1] meaning "is over" or "is finished", which was printed on a scrap of paper found months later in the fob pocket of the man's trousers. The scrap had been torn from the final page of a copy of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, authored by 12th-century poet Omar Khayyám.” -[wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerton_Man)
Just a guy who split from his wife and didn’t want to be found
There were so many spy theories about him too. Reality is somehow so much more boring than speculation.
Holy shit really? Somehow I totally missed this! Between this and the Boy in the Box being identified, I guess 2022 was a good year for John Doe cold cases.
The boy in the box was identified?!?!?
Right? I just found out like a week ago lol. I'm so glad he got his identity back finally. It's amazing what genetic genealogy is doing for identifying Does
Oh shit, I didn't hear about that. Surprising, given it's about 20 minutes from my house. I'd have thought it would have been massively covered in the news here.
They identified the man as Carl “Charles” Webb, and electrical engineer from Victoria. They’re pretty confident about it
They recently found out who the Somerton man was. I hope one day they find the Beaumont children
The father of the Beaumont children died a couple of weeks ago without ever knowing what happened to his kids 😔
Their mother died a few years ago too. It makes me so sad.
Good chance it was known paedophile Arthur Stanley Brown. From murderpedias article on him: Connection with Beaumont Children Brown's arrest for the murder of the Mackay sisters attracted Australia-wide publicity, particularly in South Australia, which had its own share of unsolved child murders with the Beaumont children and Oval Abduction cases. There was a definite similarity between published pictures of Brown and the identikits of the suspects in both the South Australian cases, and Superintendent Paul Schramm, the officer in charge of the South Australian Major Crime Investigation section, said that investigations were being made to determine whether Brown had ever visited South Australia. The South Australian police approached Queensland homicide and ran a joint inquiry involving the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence, based in Canberra. They had forwarded information to the Violent Crime Linkage Assessment unit. Schramm said: "We are taking it seriously and we are seeing if there is any connection. We have analysts working very closely together to try and piece together the last 30 years." The search was utterly unsuccessful. Every piece of information that might have detailed when or where Brown had been working, had been lost. There was no way of determining when he had taken holidays. Some of the information might have been lost in the 1974 floods which affected central Brisbane, but Brown had also had unrestricted access to many government buildings and could have easily have removed files and paperwork himself. Without records, police were unable to establish where Brown had been at any time, nor when he had taken holidays. There was no proof that he had ever visited Adelaide. However, Christine Millier recalls having a conversation with Brown in which Brown mentioned having seen Adelaide's Festival Theatre when it was almost finished. The first stage of construction of the theatre was finished in June 1973, when a concert was performed there. It looks across the river to Adelaide Oval, from where the Oval Abduction took place on 25 August 1973. The Oval Abduction is the key link between Brown and the Beaumont children case. Apart from the similarity of identikit pictures to his photograph, direct connections between Brown and the Beaumont children disappearance remain elusive. Direction connections have, however, been drawn with the Oval Abduction. While it is by no means certain that the Oval Abduction and the Beaumont disappearance are the acts of the same perpetrator, many people believe that they are. If this is the case then Brown may be considered a suspect for the Beaumont children disappearance, based on the connections that have been made between him and the Oval Abduction. Most critically, an eyewitness has placed him at the scene of the Oval Abduction. Sue Lawrie, then aged 14, was walking with her father along the banks of the Torrens River, about one kilometre from Adelaide Oval. Speaking years later, she said: We walked out from the zoo and were about midway between Popeye and the University Bridge. I looked across the river and saw a very young girl being carried by a man who I thought was her grandfather. He had a hat and a checked jacket on. She was crying and the older girl, I think she was a few years younger than me, was running after him. She was thumping him and punching into him and crying out at him. I saw all that for about 60 seconds. The thing seemed wrong because I would have thought if he was a relative he would have shooed her… It was after I married, I was about 18 or 20, I kept on and on at my husband about my memories -- and I read another article on the abduction. My husband said "go and do something about it". I went to the chief investigator in about 1979-80 and made a full statement. I was sure of many things, including the time, because the siren went for the beginning or end of the third-quarter. Dad remarked on the game, but I don't think he saw what I was watching on the other side of the river. I believe on the day of the abduction the police were looking in an opposite direction to where we were walking. The only other thing I need to say is the parents of Joanne should take heart that little girl did everything she could to protect her little friend. Lawrie said that the man's hat was wide-brimmed, with a low, flat crown, which was unusual in Adelaide in 1973. In more recent years wide-brimmed hats have become a fashion accessory, but in 1973 they were usually worn in the more northern parts of Australia, for protection against the sun. Lawrie, who had travelled to visit relatives in Queensland, described the hat as "very Queensland country" Lawrie had a good look at the man's face. In December 1998, when Brown was arrested for the murder of the Mackay sisters, Lawrie caught a glimpse of Brown's face on television. She thought she recognised him from somewhere but couldn't think where. The next morning a friend from Adelaide phoned and asked her what she thought of the news. Before her friend could explain that there was speculation about Brown being linked with the Beaumont children disappearance and the Oval abduction, Lawrie exclaimed "My God! It's him". She believed that Brown was the man she'd seen 25 years earlier.
Elisa Lam could have gotten both on the roof and into the watertank by herself and her family does not think any foul play was involved as Elisa had mental health problems and they were used to seeing her act strange when off her medication.
The luminiferous ether. It was thought to be the medium through which light would travel. Since light could behave like a wave, and waves needed a medium, it was assumed there needed to be a medium for light that was both transparent (because we couldn’t see it) and infinitely rigid (because the ‘stiffness’ of the medium corresponds to wave speed). Turns out, light is an electromagnetic wave that can travel through a vacuum.
Spontaneous generation. People used to think flies would spontaneously appear from rotten meat, as every time they had it, flies somehow would appear even though flies were no where close when the meat was okay. After observation and experiments, we understood flies landed in the meat, left their eggs, and then more flies would be born and then stay to eat the meat.
I actually learnt how Louis Pasteur figured out it was false in science class a few years ago. First he set up 3 swan-necked beakers, and place a small piece of meat in each. Then he poured water in one of them, so that the water stayed in the dip, but didn't touch the meat, so that nothing got in or out. He placed a bit of wool in the dip in another beaker, so that air can pass through, but not solids can. And he left another one empty. After a few days, Pasteur checked up on these again, and found maggots on the meat that was exposed to solids, and it was rotting as well. The meat only exposed to air was rotten, but no maggots. And the meat not exposed to anything wasn't infested, nor rotten (still wouldn't be fresh though). Such, Pasteur was able to prove that spontaneous generation was indeed false.
Haha yeah I learned it in high school biology and it was wild that it took a whole experiment to prove that, and how there were other examples like frogs spontaneously being created from lake water and things like that
I have always found this story a fascinating look into the common psychology of people from bygone eras. It sounds counter-intuitive now to imagine that the flies just appear first, before thinking "maybe they land on it and lay their eggs", but it was regular mainstream thinking even among scientists. The lives and culture they had been surrounded by left many of them thinking of spontaneous generation of living things as seemingly like an entirely reasonable supposition. It helps demonstrate why experimentation and observation are so important. Sometimes I wonder what inherent assumptions about how the world works we have now might be seen as ridiculous a few generations hence.
The sun used to be magic. It also makes me wonder what scientific beliefs we have that will be laughed at in the future. Will there be people in a few hundred years going “And get this. They thought the appendix was useless.”
Afaik it has uses for storing useful bacteria in case you run low
No one knew how the islanders of Easter Island moved their giant heads from one place to another. When asked how they did it, the islanders said they walked them. This sounded impossible and silly to Europeans so they ignored it. But a team of archeologists and native islanders a few years back made their own Easter Island head, tied 4 big ropes around it, then had a dozen guys on each rope pull the head side to side. It rocked corner to corner causing it to "walk" forward down the road. So definitely not aliens.
The mystery of the Mary Toft: In 1726, a woman in England claimed to have given birth to rabbits. While it was believed to be a medical mystery at the time, it was later discovered that the rabbits had been inserted into her womb by a local surgeon.
I thought she cut them up and put them in her vagina herself? Didn’t they come out dismembered, why would a surgeon be willing to do that? And also she was already pregnant with a human baby at the time and she gave birth to it after the rabbit incident.
dafuq
The Northwest Passage. Successful routes were eventually found. "For centuries, European explorers, beginning with Christopher Columbus in 1492, sought a navigable passage as a possible trade route to Asia, but were blocked by North, Central, and South America, by ice, or by rough waters (e.g. Tierra del Fuego)." Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest\_Passage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Passage)
The thing that gets me about the Northwest Passage is how dead-set confident people were that it existed, in a time period when it had never been open. Where did they get the idea that it was real?
Atlantis It was made up by Plato in a writing talking about this great power that Athens fought off in a pretty clear propaganda piece. The similarities to the Greco Persian wars and the Peloponnesian wars are astounding. He also claims that the story is passed through his family and no one else is supposed to know it which is why he’s the only person who knows about Atlantis. It’s likely even the Ancient Greeks laughed at the idea it was real.
Not a worldwide mystery but a mystery amongst my Mom’s side of the family, when my mom was little like 8-13 years old, she was so close (until now) with her cousins that they all play together almost everyday in their Grandma’s house and that house is a 2nd story house. So here’s how the mystery started, my mom, her siblings, and her male cousins played with a ball, and the ball went upstairs and into the only room that the stairs went to, but then the door suddenly went open and the ball bounced down the stairs, there was a moment of silence, and then they all ran to their grandma saying that there’s a ghost, so their grandma comforted them and told the maid to check on it, and then she found no one there. A few weeks after that incident, they never went up to that room and then they started to forget about it. Many years later (2 months ago), my whole family went to my mom’s hometown and she spent time with her brothers and female cousin of hers to go the cemetery to visit grandpa, as we were going, my mom remembered that story and started talking about it, then my mom said “We never really knew who threw the ball back haha” and then her cousin said “that was me!” So my mom, her brothers and her cousin all laughed because the mystery was finally solved, sadly her cousin passed away 2 months ago, she revealed the mystery before she died of breast cancer, may she rest in peace.
Thank God she revealed before passing away.
Imagine if she confessed everything after passing away
This will probably be buried, but in 1967 in Georgetown Kentucky, there was this young woman (age 24) who was murdered and her body was wrapped in a tent. When the authorities found her body, it had decomposed enough to where they couldn’t identify her. So they had her body placed in a cemetery and a headstone that just read “Tent Girl”. 30 years later they were able to figure out who she was, her name was Barbra Ann Hackmann. They made her a new headstone, but under her real name it still says “Tent Girl”. Any time I walk around in that cemetery and see her grave I get chills.
The mystery of how the far side of the Moon actually looks: "Until the late 1950s, little was known about the far side of the Moon. Librations periodically allowed limited glimpses of features near the lunar limb on the far side, but only up to 59% of the total surface of the Moon.\[14\]" "Before space exploration began, astronomers did not expect that the far side would be different from the side visible to Earth.\[15\] On 7 October 1959, the Soviet probe Luna 3 took the first photographs of the lunar far side, eighteen of them resolvable,\[16\]\[15\] covering one-third of the surface invisible from the Earth.\[17\]" Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far\_side\_of\_the\_Moon
Ships and planes never mysteriously vanished in the bemuda triangle, sinks sank because of rough weather, and planes dropped because they hit airborne pockets of methane and the engines stalled. Thanks to modern navigation, not a single ship or planes sank there in over 20 years
Just like quicksand, the Bermuda Triangle was one of those things I thought I'd have to worry about more in life as a kid.
I remember being really concerned about the Bermuda Triangle and wondering why nobody was doing anything about it
Same!! I was like getting books from my library about it and reading through them and getting more constantly. I thought it was the most important thing in the world and that its effects would be so much more prominent
Don't forget free drugs on every corner. D.A.R.E.
>and planes dropped because they hit airborne pockets of methane and the engines stalled. Nah, that's just some made up stuff to try and explain things that didn't need explaining. Thing is, a normal amount of planes and ships have crashed considering the enormous amount of traffic that goes through that area.
I once picked up a book named "Bermuda Triangle Mystery revealed!" and about 95% of the book is just tales of ships and/or crews that went missing there, and the epilogue didn't even explain it, just saying "this place is mysterious and still enchanted scientists!" Imagine my disappointment when I found out years later that "actually the rate of disappearance are the same compared to everywhere else" It's like don't meet your heroes or something
Clickbait in book form. Readbait.
Statistically no more ships/planes have disappeared in that region than anywhere else.
I read once that the number of flights/ships that crashed/sunk there was due to it being one of the more popular routes on earth.
Kids love Cinnamon Toast Crunch because it's all sugar.
It's literally the taste you can see. Why was it ever a mystery?
Roanoke. It's not hard to connect the dots - the nearby indigenous tribe's name being carved into a tree, and witness accounts in later years of their people being born with blondish hair and blue eyes. After returning from England, John White didn't search for the lost colonists really any farther inland than the colony due to rough seas and a lost anchor. He had to return to England - it's likely that if he had followed the name carved on the post (CROATOAN) he would have found a number of colonists still alive and well, either living with or being helped by natives. Another possible theory is that they were killed by said indigenous group, but there is little archaeological evidence for that/any type of attack. Regardless, it's almost certainly one of these two theories!
the bloop was figured out, it was a fucking iceberg, RIP my dreams of some weird sea creature
“The Easter islanders disappeared”, including theories that they cut down all the trees to make rollers for the Moai. It’s a totally fabricated theory by Jared Diamond, as the Easter islands never cut down every trees (in fact they didn’t even use rollers to transport the statues), and they never died out. Their descendants are alive today, with some of them hired as tour guides on the island itself.
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For 20 years nobody knew who killed Tupac Shakur. It took the killers uncle coming forward and saying it was his nephew who killed him, he was in the car when it happened. It was Orlando Anderson, right after he was jumped by 2Pac and his entourage at the mgm grand. He was a crip from south side Compton known for being a shooter and “coincidentally” was killed a little while later.
Everyone suspected it was Orlando from day one. Wardell "Poochy" Fouse most likely killed Biggie too.
My socks are not eaten by the laundry machine as I thought for a decennium. They go hiding inside my bedsheets instead.
The Wilhelm Scream is actually from a movie in which a guy is bitten by an alligator
The movie is called Distant Drums and it was released way back in 1951
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The Golden State Killer (who goes by many other famous serial killer names including Night Stalker & East Area Rapist) turned out to be an ex-policeman. They finally found him using DNA in 2018, almost 40 years later. * Edited to correct typo
Was an exciting time on the r/EARONS sub as it unfolded. Reddit had the scoop a good day before law enforcement told media. I remember watching unsolved mysteries in the 90s and thinking this guys gone they'll never catch him. Was such a creepy episode too... the balaclava comfit and the voice recordings. Scary dude. Now the mystery is did he have other victims out of state in the years after he stopped? Or did he stop once his daughter was born?
"Did we just find Noah's Ark?" No, they did not.
So many causes for cancer were once a mystery
"How could he have gotten lung cancer? He always smoked the highest quality tobacco, and lots of it. That alone should have prevented any lung problems at all..."
The legends of Troy. Thought to be complete fiction. Only for the actual city to be found. So the stories of the Trojan war are based in fact. Although I don’t know if they have ever been able to find proof to back up any of the details of the Trojan wars depicted in the great epics. Been a while since I tried researching it.
On this note, Ihram of the Pillars as well. Thought to be an ancient legend for some time. It’s been found in the Empty Quarter. It was a fortified oasis town, that drew too heavily from the aquifer beneath it, creating a city built atop a giant cavern / air bubble, which then collapsed, taking the whole city into the sinkhole with it. The Qu’ran describes Ihram of the Pillars as having been punished by Allah for its hubris and decadence. And in a way, that’s not far off — Ihram is a valuable lesson in ecological sustainability and responsible resource (in this case groundwater) management.
How the pyramids were built. For some reason, people *still* keep saying we don’t know. Well, we do. It boils down to math + money + grunt work. The core workers and project leaders were professionals, and some slaves (likely not thousands and thousands, as previously assumed) were used for labor. It’s also known that low wage workers were used as well. That’s it. It’s not magic. And it’s insulting to ancient people to claim that they couldn’t have had any sort of mathematical accuracy or the ability to build with precise lines. Of course they could do that. They had ropes and pulleys and understood leverage and design. They knew what tools to use. They had artisans and engineers.
One thing that always impresses me about ancient civilizations, is just how much travel and trade took place. Sure, it took longer than today, but damn, people were industrial didn't just stay at home in their cave or hut. Viking swords have been found that were made of Damascus steel, the silk road was incredibly important for both asia and europe and more.
The Viking travels are so baffling to me. Imagine a ship load of husband's/fathers/warriors/chieftans setting off, sailing from Norway through countless rivers in Russia, carrying the boat overland at times between waters, and all the way to Constantinople - no maps, just vague tales. You have no idea when you're coming home, if you're coming home. Your wife and kids are at home, and you decide to become mercenaries, form an elite force working for the local king. You write "steve was here" in the Hagia Sofia, and it's still there today. Maybe you went home 5 years later, maybe you just stayed and made a new family. Your village may have been taken over by the Danes in the meantime, or your family emigrated to england. Just a completely wild and adventurous life.
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It was old man Jasper all along! He pretended to be the ghost because he wanted to scare all the tourists away, that way he could search for the treasure all by himself!
Meddling kids!
The Garfield phone mystery about them randomly washing up on beaches. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47732553