6 Famous Unsolved Mysteries (With Really Obvious Solutions)
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#3.
The Mad Gasser of Mattoon
In Mattoon, Illinois in the early 1930s, reports started popping up of a man or woman deliberately spraying poisonous gasses into people's homes via the windows, and in some cases, building crude barricades to keep the victims inside. The barricade thing may seem weird, but people in the 30s were the trusting type, and apparently didn't go out to investigate when they heard the sound of sawing and hammering right outside their front doors. Anyway, the victims complained of nausea and sore throats, and sometimes would catch a glimpse of something moving outside in the distance. The town was gripped with panic, terrified that the villain would attack again with his arsenal of pretty much harmless chemicals.
Finally an official inquiry was started into the matter, to solve it once and for all. 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. Investigators filed the incident under "What the fuck?" which just happens to be conspiracy theorists favorite question to answer.
The Obvious Answer: Two weeks after it all started Thomas Wright, the commissioner of public health came and said: "There is no doubt that a gas maniac exists and has made a number of attacks. But many of the reported attacks are nothing more than hysteria. Fear of the gas man is entirely out of proportion to the menace of the relatively harmless gas he is spraying. The whole town is sick with hysteria." Yes, good job calming the hysteria with the phrase "Gas Maniac." The town police chief, on the other hand, came out and said there was actually no gasser at all, that the people were freaking out because they heard a noise, checked the window, and smelled something funny. Not unusual seeing as how their town was filled with factories and the town itself was constantly awash in chemical fumes (back then environmental regulations were pretty much done on the honor system).
After the reassuring statements from Wright and the chief of police, the public decided maybe it was time to calm down. Oh wait, no they didn't. They decided it was time to fucking freak out more. There were countless more reports, none of them ever confirmed. Oh, there may have been an actual gasser at some point, a recent book points to a local medical student who could have carried out the few actual attacks that led to the hysteria. When asked why, he reportedly stated, "Because I'm fucking insane." #2.
The Starchild Skull
Found in a mine tunnel in 1930, this odd-shaped skull is believed to be that of an alien or other magical creature (Goblin? Leprechaun?) After carbon dating, the skull was found to be about 900 years old. Paranormal researchers were quick to tell anyone who would listen that it was the skull of an alien human hybrid, or just alien, or anything paranormal. They were just happy someone was talking to them.
The Obvious Answer: Well... look at it. We only have three full-time archeologists on the staff here at Cracked, but it's pretty obvious that that is a human skull. Luckily skull experts agree that it's from a young child, 3 to 5 years old, with some type of physical deformity. The list of diseases and defects can cause this kind of abnormality is extensive. The list of paranormal reasons that have been proven to cause this isn't a list at all, it's more of a napkin smeared with Cheetoh smudges and crazy.
This one goes back to Ufologists' rather bizarre belief that aliens would look exactly like us (two eyes, a mouth, a nose, etc.) with only tiny variations (they're grey or have a weird bone in the middle of their face). Why would beings that evolved on different planets under totally different conditions look alike? If you believe the conspiracy theory that often accompanies the Starchild Skull, you'd know it's because aliens planted humans on earth thousands of years ago! So either we're just a giant colony of sea monkeys for extremely bored aliens, or 900 years ago at least one kid had a weird-shaped head. #1.
The Bermuda Triangle
Well for one thing, that's not even a triangle. This is the granddaddy of supposed paranormal phenomena. You know the story: you go into the Triangle, you don't come out. It's some kind of magical black hole around Florida, Puerto Rico and Bermuda where ships, planes and probably countless confused whales have disappeared. According to paranormal "experts" this is easily attributable to either aliens, interdimensional portals, demons, ghosts, Bigfoot, ghost Bigfoot, sea monsters or stargates.
Even Christopher Columbus claimed he saw weird shit there more than 500 years ago. To read books about the subject, you'd think ships disappear by the hundreds every week. So what's the deal? Are the boats getting sucked through a time portal? Being sunk by savages from the mystical lost city of Atlantis? Or is it Cthulhu? It's Cthulhu, isn't it?
The Obvious Answer: Again we must refer to the scientific phenomenon called People Making Up Bullshit. As experts have pointed out, the entire Bermuda Triangle mystery is based around people taking routine disappearances and spicing them up in the retelling. So for instance, part of the legend is a plane inexplicably vanished off the coast of Daytona on a sunny day in 1957. A search of the newspaper that day revealed that either it didn't happen, or all the witnesses signed a pact of silence in their own blood lest the triangle take them too. They like to describe missing ships as having "disappeared" or saying they "were never seen again", which immediately brings to mind magic. In reality when a boat sinks you're probably not going to see it again because, you know, it's on the bottom of the fucking ocean.
Believers often fail to mention that many of the disappearances happen during storms and rough seas, when you'd pretty much expect ships to sink. Other times ships would be reported missing and thus added to the Triangle's tally, then nobody bothers to correct it when the ships turn up later unharmed (like because the Captain was drunk off his ass and accidentally sailed to Portugal). But the final stake into the heart of the Dracula that is the Bermuda Triangle mystery is the fact that the number of disappearances is no larger than any other well-traveled part of the ocean (the Triangle includes some of the busiest waters on the planet). Once again, the only magic at work is the mystical human hunger for bullshit.
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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?