6 Famous Unsolved Mysteries (That Have Totally Been Solved)
One of our favorite pastimes here at Cracked is sucking the mystery out of life like the cream out of a Twinkie, leaving only the bland, dry sponge cake of reality behind. To that end, we've decided to list the often mundane solutions to some of the world's most enduring mysteries, and once again, you're welcome.
#6.
Amelia Earhart
The disappearance of Amelia Earhart is probably the most well-known mystery in the world that doesn't involve Tom Hanks looking for clues in old paintings. In 1936, Earhart planned to reserve herself a page in the record books by flying around the world; a 29,000-mile journey. On the last 7,000-mile leg of her second attempt in 1937, she disappeared after giving her last radio transmission. The transmission was not anything helpful like, "I'm going to try to just fly through this mountain. I saw it in a cartoon once."
More has been speculated about her disappearance than has probably been written about her life. One of the more epic theories is that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, went down over part of the Japanese Empire and were captured, interrogated as spies and executed. Some assert that she was actually a spy for President Roosevelt, and that she secretly lived to the end of her days in New Jersey. Still others, with less imagination, think that she deliberately flew her plane into the Pacific because fuck it.
Maybe her gigantic head popped at high altitude.
The Answer:
Remarkably, we've pretty much had the Earhart mystery solved ever since partial remains were found on an island... in 1940. That's right, 70 years ago. Only four years after she vanished.
To be fair, half of the bones were carried away by giant crabs, and the rest have since been lost because nobody thought it was important or even curious that a skeleton should turn up on an island just southeast of where Amelia freaking Earhart was going. Neither did it strike a chord that the remains turned out to be those of a white woman with Earhart's measurements, or that they were found alongside a pocket knife, a broken cosmetics jar, a piece of glass from an airplane windshield and the same exact type of navigational system Earhart had been using. It's inconclusive, dammit!
The truth is out there. And we won't rest until we find it, or we get too drunk to remember how to spell "Eaerhurt."
Even though all of this evidence is circumstantial, it's a freaking slam-dunk compared to what we have been forced to swallow from conspiracy theorists, who rank Earhart's disappearance right up there with the mystery of the Mary Celeste.
Which reminds us...
#5.
The Ghost Ship Mary Celeste
In 1872, the ship was spotted off the Azores in the Atlantic completely intact and undisturbed, aside from its missing crew. Not a single person, alive or dead or undead, could be found, despite everyone's personal belongings still sitting undisturbed where they had been left. Even little things like valuables and piano music were right where they should have been. It was as if its crew had simply evaporated.
The strange case of the disappearing crew of the merchant ship Mary Celeste is not only the most famous maritime mystery in history, it is the episode which served as midwife to the Bermuda Triangle hysteria.
We are through the looking glass here, people.
So how did everyone just vanish? Ghosts? Aliens? Sea monsters? Dimensional vortex? According to the History Channel, yes. After all, the case has proven a tough one to crack. All the ship's papers were missing, but the logbook was still safe and sound. Piracy is unlikely since there were no signs of a struggle and no booty missing. The main hatch was sealed, and there were no storms or time/space disruptions reported in the area.
Reports of elevated Old One activity remain unconfirmed.
The Answer:
Scientists now point to the one baffling clue that the ship left us with: Of its cargo of 1,701 barrels of alcohol, nine were empty. We know what you're thinking: The crew threw their captain overboard so that they could get drunk off raw alcohol and take the lifeboat out for a joyride, which went splendidly until they crashed it into a whale. Sounds like one hell of an interesting weekend, but the truth is actually a billion times more awesome.
You all ready for this?
The single greatest maritime mystery in history is now believed to have been the subject of one of the most incredible explosions in the history of alcohol. Dr. Andrea Sella, a professor of chemistry at University College London, created a replica of the Mary Celeste's hold back in 2006 just so he could find a MacGyverish way to blow it up without leaving a single sign of a fire. He simulated a leak of the ship's nine barrels of alcohol and found that once the vapor was ignited, say by a pipe or a spark, it created a "pressure-wave type of explosion... There was a spectacular wave of flame but, behind it, was relatively cool air. No soot was left behind and there was no burning or scorching."
Dr. Andrea Sella.
That's right, the Mary Celeste was likely subject to a freaky ghost explosion powerful enough to blow open all the hatches, but ultimately leave everyone and everything on the boat completely unharmed. The crew, however, would have experienced a freakout akin to when the Nazis opened the Ark of the Covenant.
It appears the missing crew were so utterly horrified that they piled into the ship's lifeboat without any useful things like food or water, eventually sinking or dying of thirst and exposure. Yes, the Mary Celeste would have still looked perfectly fine as they sailed off into Death's open arms, but ask yourself: Would you have volunteered to go back onto that ship?
#4.
The Fate of Atlantis
Atlantis sure is one hell of a tantalizing story. First documented by the ancient Greek philosophers, it serves constantly as a warning for modern society against every possible threat from war to climate change to alien invasion, where applicable. They were the most advanced civilization on Earth, but even they couldn't stop whatever catastrophe managed to sink their island into the Atlantic. For centuries we have dreamed about finding this lost city and unlocking the secrets to its fate, so that we might prevent the same thing happening to us!
And make an Indiana Jones video game with a better plot than two of the movies.
Unfortunately, the search for Atlantis has yielded exactly no results ever. Plato is pretty much all we have to work with, and he's too dead to return any of our calls. However, this hasn't stopped proponents of the theory of the lost city to draw fancy maps of it, which sure does feel like a step in the right direction for some reason.
The fact that they avoided Oklahoma is clear evidence of their status as a super-advanced society.
Nevertheless, Atlantis has turned into a bit of a super-conspiracy theory which absorbs just about anything you throw at it, and has served as a tentative answer to basically every other mystery in this article.
The Answer:
Atlantis is not a thing.
First of all, our knowledge of plate tectonics rules out the possibility of sunken mystery continents. But there's a far more convincing reason than even this: That is, Atlantis was something that Plato completely pulled out of his ass just so Socrates could have something to talk about, and he specifically mentions in his writing that Atlantis is a completely hypothetical city.
"No one will take this 'Atlantis' shit seriously. They'd have to be even more drunk and ignorant than ancient Greeks."
This is part of the reason why Atlantis was not taken seriously until modern times. Most ancients actually took Plato's dialogues as the thought experiments they really were.
What's more, the book that mentions Atlantis, the Timaeus, is fewer than 100 pages long. This is shit you can seriously knock out while you're killing time at the bus station. Though it should not come as much surprise that countless books and god knows how many hours of the History Channel have been dedicated to asking a riddle as easy to solve as looking up a word in the dictionary. It's pretty damn easy to pass yourself as an expert in a book that most people have never actually read past the first few pages.
The History Channel: For People Who Hate Reading.
From what I've heard about the pyramids the historians have not been able to come up with any type of ramp that would work well for the pyramid. A straight ramp would have to be over a mile long to reach the top and a spiral one would be able to reach the top because there wouldn't be enough space.
ReplyYou do know that Anastasia is a movie made by Fox, right?
Reply"Though it should not come as much surprise that countless books and god knows how many hours of the History Channel have been dedicated to asking a riddle as easy to solve as looking up a word in the dictionary."
ReplyYeahhh.... though it should come as no suprise WHAT? That is the most awkward fragment of a sentence i've ever read. Though it should come as no surprise that it's easiy solvable, (now finish the sentence..e.g. "though it should come as no surprise that it is easily solvable, people still insist on making more of it than is actually needed.) The writers at Cracked are so uneducated and poor writers that most of the articles are just becomming pretentious works of crap, completely unreadable. They're becomming less entertaining and funny and more arrogant and misinformed every day. This site is going down the tubes and if you read the comments you can see that most people agree with me. Cracked: you need to up the quality of your writing staff. This site has long been one of my favorite time wasters, but the older I get, the more need i have to read things that are actually factual and less junk food literature. It already is, but the least you could do is stop hiding behind the "we're not journalists, we're bloggers, so we don't have to have journalistic integrity and actually research what we write, it's meant for entertainment, not knowledge" excuse. You present these articles as though they are to be taken as informative works of journalistic lit, but they're not. They are pure fiction in some cases. Up your game.
Its a run on sentince, not a fragment. did you not notice the action "have been dedicated" as in "I dedicate this sentence to undermining the core foundation of your rant"
*sentence.
About the Atlantis story: the most plausible explanation is that it was a hypothetical story made up by Plato. The only ancient record of Atlantis was from Plato, in a brief anecdote. The best that can be said for Atlantis is that it may have been inspired by real-life events. Cities and civilizations have risen and fallen many times and by the time Plato was writing, scads of examples would've been available from history and folklore of cities being abandoned, destroyed by war, or destroyed by natural disaster. And even in Plato's time, they had stories of ancient civilizations long gone - Plato was writing in the 5th century BC. Mesopotamia, the Indus, the Sumerians, the Minoans, the Hittites, the Assyrians - all were long gone by then. The Egyptians had already gone through the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms. Dead civilizations make for exciting stories, whether or not they're true - we still have apocalyptic "collapse of civilization" fiction today.
ReplyTwo thousand years from now, people will tell each other stories about mythical Gotham, a mystical city that was the battleground of a mysterious Dark Knight and a trickster figure known as the Heath Ledger - perhaps an instructive fable out of primitive animalistic mythology, or a symbolic allegory of a war between two rival city-states. But did Gotham truly exist? Or did aliens abduct the island into space, perhaps to build the so-called "Death Star"? How else could the Americans have gained knowledge of the histories from a long time ago in a galaxy far away, if aliens hadn't shared it with them first? Find out what our future government doesn't want you to know, next on Future History Channel.
"What? We didn't build the pyramids; we killed the dinosaurs."
Reply-3rd Rock from the Sun
you know if i was a billionaire i would recreate atlantis the same way they do with those man made islands
ReplySeveral of your explanations here don't really rise to the level of "solved", but are more like "here's one interesting theory that has been suggested as the solution." Your explanation of the Marie Celeste is total speculation based on, what?, one guy's idea of what might happen if the conditions were just right, and if you then assume that the people present all panicked, and preferred to die in a life boat rather than row back to the ship. Anastasia? Yeah, pretty much solved. The pyramids? Only a mystery if you start with the assumption that everyone who lived before you were born was an incompetent moron, or you just can't imagine how people managed to add before calculators were invented or how they travelled long distances without jet planes. But for the rest, you've offerred suggestoins ranging from "sounds plausible" to "well maybe", but these are far from settled. Oh, and PS, Plato did NOT say that Atlantis was a "hypothetical" place. I've read Timaeous, there's nothing in there to indicate that he did not believe Atlantis to be real. I sincerely doubt it was a real place, but Plato didn't say that.
Replywell for anastasia it isnt pretty much solved its completly solved they found all the bodies and have done dna test to prove that all of them were killed and as for atlantis i have no idea of it existed but what if it did it could have been located in what is now antartica
> a mystery if you start with the assumption that everyone who lived before you were born was an incompetent moron
You'd be amazed how popular that theory is.
Also, there's that minor matter the article points out that ancient Egyptian society was capable of rather more than the popular culture version of it; the one we usually see in films probably *wouldn't* have been able to build the pyramids. Pity it bears no resemblance to the real thing.
While Atlantis was probably made up by Plato (it exists in no other ancient source), it should be noted that in Timaeos (which the writer has even linked to) he repeatedly mentions that it is a true story, told to Solon by Egyptian priests who had kept ancient records of the events 9000-10000 years before his time. Subsequent historians have speculated that Plato was inspired by Helike, a coastal city in Achaea that became submerged after a violent earthquake just a few years before Timaeon and Kritias (the latter book contains most of the details on how Atlantis and its contemporary Athens functioned) were written. There is nothing linking the Atlantis myth to Santorini, other than a few coincidences, and I wish people like Really Now would bother to read Plato's works before making such assertations.
Replyanastasia wasn't a Disney production, fyi
ReplyThanks for the info. Dozens of people hadn't bothered to mention it yet.
Atlatis did exist but Kratos destroyed it while on his quest to find his brother Deimos.
ReplyI think you are mixing mythology with reality.
And then Kratos fought Jesus on top of a skyscraper while screaming THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!
There is a pretty cool book Stonehenge: A History in Photographs that shows different excavations and over hauls the rocks have had in "modern" times. I'm air quoting modern because a lot of this sh!t happened per-industrial revolution.
ReplyMost of the stones were raised, several that had fallen over were unearthed and re-set. All with out any heavy duty machinery. There are grainy black and white pictures of teams of men, heavy horses, some really big boards and thick ropes giving Stonehenge a face lift.
Anastasia wasn't one of the Disney princesses, mainly because the movie was made by Fox Animation Studios.
ReplyYou forget her brother Alexei was a source of mystery too. They found his body along with Anastasia's.
Replyactually it widely believed by many experts it wasnt anastasias body but one of her sisters. because anastasia was only 16 almost 17 the remaines were estimated to be a female between 18 and like 22 so it had to have been one of her sisters
@randell - Not quite "widely believed." Some have proffered up that theory, but the problem is that estimating the age of a person after decades of decomposition isn't necessarily precise enough to exclude someone based on one or two years' difference.
What the article doesn't mention is that there is a decent amount of documentary evidence available post-USSR that backs up the notion that Anastasia was executed and buried there. The records suggest that she and her brother were killed separately from the other members of the family and buried in a different grave.
I still like Scott Westerfield's explanation for Tunguska better.
Reply*ACHOO*
ReplySorry, i'm allergic to gigantic amounts of bullshit. Seriously, is this the best you could come up with? You're using psuedo-scientific knowledge and some pretty large assumptions without ANY circumstantial evidence to back it up in order to explain these.
And no duh Earhart crashed and died...
those weren't amelias remains, they were one of the many other flying women of the time. euro-bred chicks flying planes were all too common, really rather quite a nuisance. amelia just happened to fly over those remains and dropped her pocket knife with them because she thought it really pulled it all together (you know how women are). the truth about what happened to her is she was abducted by aliens who though she looked good, and gave birth to that chick from twilight.
ReplyAnastasia wasn't a Disney film. Just so you know.
ReplyYou are right, I believe it was a Don Bluth film.
Holy s**t, the people commenting on this article take their animated movies very f*****g seriously!
ReplyBecause animated movies are awesome, dammit!
Because its obviously more important to be correct about cartoons than reality. duh.
This is based on a half-remembered documentary I watched a few years ago but (while if Atlantis was originally a hypothetical, I'm not arguing with that) there have been a couple of incidences of islands - one of them inhabited - sinking with little to no warning. They were volcanic islands with a build-up of gas underneath them (I think)
ReplyAs a result I've never seen what all the fuss was about regarding Atlantis, apart from various theories that their society was far more intelligent than the rest of the world, and that Disney movie where they were magic or something.
I'd also like to add to the outrage over your ill-judged Hercules remark :) it wasn't half bad, and had the only female Disney co-star that I could actually stand, even if she did take the ridiculous Disney female body shape to alarming new places.
I think you are talking about Santorini, which is the caldera of a mega volcano like Yellowstone, it had a civilization in it, pretty big, the Minoians.
Also, there is a painting found in Egypt that shows an island city in concentric circles, just like Atlantis, or Santorini's original layout.
¿Do you specialize in disinformation (deliberate dissemination of inaccurate information intended to confuse and frustrate one’s opposition)?
Reply Hide All See All 6 RepliesAmelia EARHART
No CONCLUSIVE evidence has ever been found: That doesn’t mean they didn’t find “a” body, for clearly they did (according to you, in a claim I’ve never seen before, though not for trying very damned hard). ¿But is it HER body? Only DNA can confirm that, and unfortunately DNA was only discovered in 1953; 16 years too late. (James D WATSON was only NINE, Rosalind E FRANKLIN was 17, and Francis HC CRICK was 21 at the time of her disappearance, and these were the discoverers of DNA.) There is equally supportable evidence that her briefcase was found by the Japanese, and the argument that she may have piggybacked her record attempt with an intelligence gathering mission can not be discoutneted.
Status: This case remains open because it can not be solved.
Atlantis:
Is actually the modern day island of Santorini (ancient name Thera), upon which the Minoan civilization developed at Knossos. They had cold AND hot running water (something that would not be seen again for several thousand years; even running water only dates back to later dark age/early renaissance), but suffered a cataclysmic volcanic eruption that wiped their civilization off the face of the earth.
Status: Case Closed; Site rebuilt.
Tunguska:
While “some researchers at Cornell University” have presented an interesting and plausible theory, the Russians presented another “interesting and plausible theory” (that it was caused by an meteorite or comet), and the TESLA theory, while a bit more esoteric, is perfectly plausible (that he built the world’s first laser cannon, and thus the blueprint for the Death Star, just to show off to Admiral Robert PEARY, USN).
Status: Case open; None of the suspects have an alibi, but not enough physical evidence exists to convict any of them either.
Stonehenge and The Pyramids:
Not that the article answered the question, but yes, simple brute human strength and not so brute ingenuity completed these project; The use of slaves, however, is fact, and can be corroborated by Egyptian records, rather than just Hebrew (Jewish) records.
Status: Long closed, and repeatedly proven out.
you are such a f*g
Yeah, actually, they way that workers who died during building the pyramids were treated showed that they were probably volunteers, not slaves. When they died, they buried in tombs near or attached to the pyramid (can't remember exactly), with inscriptions showing that the pharaoh had great respect and thanks for them, something they would NOT have done at the time if those were slaves.
Knossos is on Crete, not Santorini, dumbass. And the pyramid builders were actually Egyptians, not foreign slaves.
Watson, Crick, and Franklin DISCOVERED DNA? Really? Try Meischer. But who am I to argue with someone pointing out how wrong other people are?
Slaves did not build the Egyptian pyramids. They used a system of labor tax. During the off season of farming, the poor folk paid their taxes to the government by building things. The Inca had a similar system of taxation. If you're going to be a pedantic turd, you might as well have your facts right.
You're just as guilty of bullshit. So at santorini there has been found absolute proof it was Atlantis?? Stfu. This is a humor site offering fairly interesting theories. There's no need to regurgitate someone elses theories as you're own and screech "fact" when you're criticizing cracked for doing the same. So you read a 100 page book? Whoop-di-fuck. I assume you're an archeologist, did you're own survey, and read a copy penned by Pluto himself?? Yeah, stfu.