6 Famous Unsolved Mysteries (With Really Obvious Solutions)
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The world is a magical place, full of mysteries science may never understand. It's also full of bullshit that people just make up to draw attention to themselves. At the heart of pretty much every "paranormal" phenomenon you find some lonely, attention-seeking soul, or several of them, willing to put a spooky little twist on an otherwise boring story. But it usually doesn't take a whole lot of examination to find the truth. For instance... #6.
The Dyatlov Pass Incident
On February 2nd, 1959, during the cold winter on Kholat Syakhl ("Mountain of the Dead") in Russia, nine intrepid ski hikers decided to do what they do best, which is ski hike, whatever the hell that is. On February 26th, the first of their very dead bodies turned up. Man, who would have thought such a tragedy could strike on "The Mountain of the Dead?"
But it was the discovery of the campgrounds that added the icing to the creepy-as-fuck cake. The ski hikers' tent was shredded. The skiers were scattered around the grounds wearing either very sparse clothing or just their underwear. Three of them were found with crushed ribs and fractured skulls, but no visible defense marks or other signs of a struggle.
Oh yeah, and one of the bodies was missing a tongue. In case you weren't already on the phone with Mulder and Scully, trace levels of radiation were supposedly found on their bodies. The official statement on what happened was about as vague and ass-covering as possible, saying it was caused by an "unknown compelling force." In laymen's terms this means, "fuck if we know." The story has become an internet sensation over the years, with many people blaming aliens, and then ghosts, and then the yeti, or possibly all of them working in tandem.
The Obvious Answer: So there's six things that freak people out about this one: 1. The no-tongued woman 2. A mysterious orange tan on the dead bodies 3. The ripped tents 4. The hikers' lack of clothing 5. The crushing damage done to three of the hikers 6. The traces of radioactivity The big fact that gets lost in the re-telling of this story is that the bodies weren't found until weeks later. It's not like somebody turned their back, then five minutes later all their friends were dead and half naked.
That makes the missing tongue a lot easier to explain. As disturbing as it may be, the first thing a scavenging animal is going to go for is probably the soft tissue of an open mouth, especially if it still smelled like the burrito the hiker just ate. Laying out in the sun surrounded by white snow for days also accounts for the weird tan. The trauma and the destroyed tent points to an avalanche. Their state of undress can be explained by paradoxical undressing, a known behavior of hypothermia victims when their brains start to freeze and malfunction. In other words, it's the kind of behavior you'd expect from a group of injured avalanche victims wandering around in the middle of the night in the freezing cold.
What about the radioactivity? Or stranger details that turn up in some accounts, like orange lights in the sky? Well, there's the fact that none of that stuff turns up in the original documents from the incident, and appears to have been added later by people who just can't resist making things spookier than they are. It's those later accounts that have stuck in the public memory, because so many of the original reports were destroyed (this was the Cold War-era Soviet Union, which treated casserole recipes as state secrets). So none of the details on their own prove anything other than a tragic hiking accident. The conspiracy-loving public widely reject this, too busy lighting their torches and getting their pitchforks to go hunt down an, "unknown compelling force."
#5.
The Lost Roanoke Colony
The Roanoke Colony was either the first permanent settlement in America, or an elaborate practical joke. Walter Raleigh sent the colonists there and then left them without supplies for three years, perhaps just to see what would happen. What he probably didn't expect was for the colony to just vanish. When new settlers finally arrived, none of the original colony remained at the settlement (except for the old skeleton of one guy) and the mysterious word "Croatan" was carved into a tree, right under, "Metallica Rules".
So, was it a UFO abduction? Perhaps the colonists were held in some kind of suspended animation and are still being anally probed to this very day.
The Obvious Answer: That second group of settlers didn't really get the chance to investigate what happened to the original bunch, because a few years later an even bigger mysterious phenomena occurred: Blue-eyed, pale-complexioned Indians began showing up on nearby Croatan Island. So what to make of these mysterious children, who looked like they might have been the descendents of white/Indian mixed race parents? On CROATAN island? It's almost as if, we don't know, a certain group of settlers realized their colony sucked, and went and found some natives nearby who seemed to know how to live off the land. And that they then left their shitty colony forever to go live happily ever after on Croatan Island, and to have impressive amounts of sex with the natives.
#4.
The Hopkinsville Goblin Case
In 1955, members of the Sutton family were out on their porch enjoying a relaxing visit/drinking binge with their good friend Billy Ray Taylor. Billy Ray decided to go out and get a drink of water from the well, when shit started getting weird. He ran back in to tell everyone he'd seen some bright lights in the sky and that everyone should come look. According to one member of the Sutton clan, upon stepping outside the Suttons-plus-one encountered: "... a luminous, three-and-a-half-foot-tall being with an oversized head, big, floppy, pointed ears, glowing eyes, and hands with talons at their ends. The figure, either made of or simply dressed in silvery metal, had its hands raised."
After seeing these figures coming out of the woods, showing the universal sign of surrender, the Suttons did the only thing they could do: try to kill their asses.
As they shot at the defenseless creatures with rifles, they claim to have heard clangs and ricochets as if the aliens were wearing some kind of metal armor. They said the aliens "flipped over and fled into the darkness when shot at." The Obvious Answer: This is a sketch of one of the aliens.
This is a great horned owl.
Look at the head of the "creature" then look at the head of the owl. Now, get really, really drunk. We're talking "mid-1950s rural Kentucky" drunk. Ufologist Renaud Leclet admitted, "It could be a misidentification of a pair of Great horned owls, which are nocturnal, fly silently, have yellow eyes, and aggressively defend their nests." Oh, and that sound of metal clanging and ricochets during the shooting? Get drunk and shoot towards a target in front of your tin chicken coup. So it's either that, or there may still be an interstellar invasion force on the way to retaliate. |
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I was so glad to see that stupid Croatan 'mystery' here. I learned about it in...4th grade? It was so dumb, I asked my teacher why they didn't just check the island, the missing people probably just packed up and moved there. She said that they couldn't due to harsh conditions and the food supply was running low or something. And about the Bermuda Triangle, I went to Bermuda and visited a ton of museums like a good little tourist. I came across a little square, with like 6 lines of text. It said something along the lines of, "There is no such thing as the bermuda triangle. The myths were created because of the combination of mixing sea currents, erratic magnetic fields, and coral beds that would sink ships. No Bermudian will mention the triangle since it is fake." Like, there's a current north of Bermuda and it's going east, and a current south of Bermuda going west, and so there's a giant swirling current around Bermuda, which confuses ships. Bermuda has a weird magnetic field, which explains why compasses and radios and stuff stopped working. Bermuda is full of rocks and coral that ships would get snagged on and dragged to their dooms. It was called the Devil's Island, I think. So yeah. Also, I probably got some of this info wrong since it's from memory. But...yeah.
Regarding #2, while yes, I agree that this was v. probably a deformed human child, the point about aliens looking suspiciously like humans - ever hear of co-emergent evolution? There's the idea out there that most life-supporting planets will be fairly similar, so lifeforms there will face similar challenges, evolve similarly to overcome these challenges, and therefore the first animal that goes on to become tool-using and intelligent will probably have taken a similar evolutionary path to us.
Some specific highly complex evolutionary responses (like eyes) have been shown to have evolved separately on Earth. For (fictitious, hypothetical) example, somewhere in prehistoric Madagascar, a beetle develops the first primitive photosensors that will become the eyes that all beetles posses. Somewhere else a million years before, the same thing happened with butterflies. Somewhere under the sea a billion years before, the same thing happened with squid, and their forebears all ended up with sophisticated eyes based on similar principles, cos those were the elegant and sound principles for the eyes of carbon-based oxygen-breathing lifeforms to be based upon.
Good article, but the horse picture?
0_0
Disturbing...
On the Colony of Roanoke, I'm a descendant of Captain John White. When he was finally able to go back to the island and found the colony gone the reason that they didn't head over to the island of Croatan was because the captain of the ship and the crew he hired to get there was more interested in going out after spanish treasure ships then checking out an island.
So it wasn't "Hey, like the nearby island. Whatever, I'm sure that's just a coincidence." It was "Hey I think we should go look on this island they might be there." and then was told "Go to Hell! We want to go get some booty!"
"So either we're just a giant colony of sea monkeys for extremely bored aliens"... s**t, that's the whole concept of the Ayreon (www.ayreon.com) epic story!
Yeah, I'd definitely set the sunken city of R'lyeh in the Bermuda triangle (of course it's a triangle and it's not a triangle at all... it's f*****g Alien geometry!).
Also, this is the second article (besides 6 Insane Discoveries That Science Can't Explain) which has Cthulhu mentiones in #1. Go, Great Old Ones! xD
Kind of a weak dismissal of the facts regarding the Bermuda Triangle. Yes, the figures are inflated and the spooky factor is exaggerated, but there are still too many odd incidents--many with living eyewitnesses--to dismiss.
The folks with the methane gas theory about the Bermuda Triangle are correct. The History Channel or Discovery Channel did a show on it, in between specials about Hitler and the next five massive natural superdisasters that are definitely going to kill us all no matter what we do.
Huge emissions of methane are released. If an unlucky boat is above the release, the gas bubble's density is too low for the ship to maintain bouyancy. It momentarily sinks several meters while, all around it, the water explodes upward, flooding its decks. The combination of the two forces is enough to sink any ship. It's theorized that a large enough emission could capsize a ship, snapping its hull in two, but that would have to be a God-sized fart.
Likewise, planes get hit by a similar one-two punch (or possibly a one-two-three punch). The methane is less dense than air, so it causes their altimeters (which are based on atmospheric pressure) to report wild and sudden elevation increases, the needle literally spinning around several times. At the same time, the drop in air pressure causes the planes to lose elevation, even as their instrumentation reports just the opposite. The pilots either believe their instruments and dive toward the ocean, or they try to regain control within a giant methane cloud. This effort either proves impossible, due to the incredibly low air pressure, or it results in setting their engines on fire. 'Cuz methane 'splodes stuff.
Where does the methane come from?
Cthulhu. Friggin' DUH!
I noticed for the #1 unsolved mystery, the Bermuda Triangle, and explanation (although very sound) was still kind of limited. I think its legitimately some kind of area who's magnetic field is fucked, and so explaining how sometimes planes wouldn't show up on any detectors or why in some people's planes, they're systems start messing up. Because this freaks people out, there became a flurry of people with made-up stories to hype it all up. The very thought of passing through the "triangle" excites people and therefore when they pass through they get disappointed and make something up instead. -shrugs-
Mitochondrial DNA showed that it was human. Of course the loony alien lovers interpreted this to mean that the mother was human, the father not. They try to back up this theory with claims that since the nuclear DNA has not been recovered it must be other than human. What they won't tell you is that nuclear DNA degrades very rapidly while mitochondrial DNA is more readily available for much longer.
There are many chromosomal mutations that can produce very unique physiological oddities. Some of the trisomies are occasionally compatible with life and the degree to which the offspring is effected can vary greatly. Other mutations spring up unexpectedly and may never be seen again in the human population so there literally is no basis for comparison. Why do you think so many of these mutations are named after the discovering physician? Because they were newly discovered, duh. Just because that particular type of mutation has never been seen before doesn't mean it doesn't exist. In addition, generally modern parents of effected children aren't too eager to have some scientist dissect their deceased children out of curiosity, so many of these mutations are never closely studied or described.
The only weird thing here is that a child with mutations this terrible could live to be several years old.
http://www.starchildproject.com/
I'm not one of those crazy "Holy s**t look at that lightning bug!1!!11! It r a alienz!!!1!!!!1@#!#$" types of people, but they did a lot more reasearch on the starchild skull than you've shown here. On the official research website (not the crazy conspiracy theorist one run by Bigfoot, Nessie and Chuck Norris) for the skull as well as a recent TV documentary show that the Starchild skull has around two and a half times the brain capacity (meaning the inside of it's skull is much bigger), It had very wide shallow eyes, and many unexplainable nooks and crannys on the outside of the skull.
some of us commenters are as batshit crazy as some of these "witnesses" cough cough *werthq
Hey cool! Doc Savage taking on the mad gasser? Don't seem to recall that adventure. Or Maybe Doc WAS the mad gasser? He had all those gadgets, after all, and anesthetic glass balls (he-he).
I rode a horse like that once and got the hell lost. wandered around in circles for days, ugly son of a b***h
"Now get really drunk. We're talking mid-1950s rural Kentucky drunk". I rofl'd at that joke.
For Hopskinville Goblin, I'd say they were just alien children who got lost, they can't be great horn owls because of their color, they were probably children of a alien travler who took a pit stop at earth, and look how their greeted, their fu*king shot at like fu*king animals, and they were just playing, the ricochet sound meant he hit a car or something metal, like a can of red bull, the children had steel skin (Extreme evouloution, if they had steel skin then what the fu*k about claws or fangs, or plasma screen tvs on the top of their heads), or the guy was just hi. It also could have been all delusional, and saw a few animals or children as monsters, and shot at them, thank the lord they missed! Phew!
Damn. I was hoping for Cthulhu..
"They gathered eye witness reports and wound up with descriptions of the perpetrator as a tall, short, male, female, fat, thin, human, ghost, Nazi, dinosaur ... pretty much the whole spectrum of life past and present on planet earth."
Welcome to every multiple person eyewitness account ever.
People probably wouldn't even know their own hair/eye color if it wasn't printed on their drivers' licenses. Gah.
CTHULHU IS COMING!!! HE'S JUST WAITING FOR SOMEONE TO NUKE AMERICA, THEN HE'LL TAKE CONTROL OF THE MUTANT ZOMBIE MASSES AND ISSUE FOR THE APOCALYPSE!!! BOW DOWN OR SUFFER!!!
At least I hope that happens. It'd be more interesting than most other Apocalypse theories. Mutant zombies man!
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I just want a source for the "(like because the Captain was drunk off his ass and accidentally sailed to Portugal)." because that has to be a spectacularly great story. Someone message me if they have a link?