It's easy to see how the many unsolved mysteries of the world easily grab our attention and hold on to it once we learn about them. There was a whole long-running television series dedicated to the subject, after all.
It doesn't take much to get lost down the research rabbit hole on a slow afternoon researching your favorite mystery, trying to find the answer to what really happened.
Reddit user the-salt-of-dungroon asked:
"Which unsolved mystery are you most interested in? Why?"
10.
The Voynich Manuscript. It's a book that's totally undeciphered, and written in an unknown language, with pictures of plants that aren't any identifiable plants, and other strange things like women coming out of pipes. It's carbon dated to the 1400's but nothing else is known about its origin, and all attempts to figure it out have been debunked.
There are folks who have identified plants in the manuscript—visual representations here
In some cases they took artistic liberties but a lot of it is just a bit crude and limited in color
9.
An obscure one I learned from Unsolved Mysteries: the 1987 Arkansas murders of Don Henry and Kevin Ives, the Boys on the Tracks
True Crime Garage did a brilliant 4 part series on this. Highly recommended listening to it, some of the twists and turns in this story are unbelievable and everything points to some very shady characters in high places being involved.
To be honest? I think it really is just an experimental aircraft testing site. Lots of old reports and descriptions of UFOs from the area are super consistent with modern day stealth bombers. Plus, who knows what kind of secret things they could have made that we don’t even know about?
Sounds right. A massive government cover up seems incredibly unlikely. Not because they wouldn't..just because there's way too much in-fighting and incompetence for anything to stay secret for this long.
7.
Brian Shaffer’s disappearance from a bar in Columbus. There is no footage of him leaving the bar at all that night, despite there being footage of the one entrance/exit all night (even capturing him leaving and going back into the bar prior to closing).
He was a good looking med student who had everything going for him and he was 6’2”... not likely that he’d get grabbed without someone noticing or become victim to a random attack.
He was never located and his phone even rang three times once when dialed. His friend refuses to sit for a lie detector and there is speculation that Columbus PD thinks he may be alive.
It just feels so sinister.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Brian_Shaffer
6.
The Villisca Axe Murders because a whole family and a couple of their kids friends were violently murdered via axe. The killer was never caught (I'm assuming because it happened in 1912). I'm going to school for forensic investigation and one of my friends told me about how one of her professors had made her class write a paper analyzing the murders and stuff (I had to do a paper on the important evidence of the O.J. Simpson trial).
These Low Effort Jobs Have Surprisingly High Salaries | George Takei’s Oh Myyy
Have you ever worked one of those jobs that paid you to kinda sit there? If you have, you know the joy that comes with watching the entirety of Breaking Bad ...I’ve been to that beach where he went missing a few times. It’s scary dangerous how rough the water is even on relatively calm days. It’s got lots of rock ledges, thick seaweed and washing machine water flows. I think he was crazy just to think of going swimming there.
There’s another theory that he was picked up by a Russian or Chinese Submarine.
Typical Aussie sense of humour moment - a swimming pool is named after him!
4.
Malaysia Airlines flight 370. Would do anything to learn what actually happened on that flight.
Just goes to show how big the ocean is that even a 777 can just disappear forever in it's depths....
3.
There are a lot of undeciphered languages out there. A large portion are because the languages either grew up in isolation or didn’t leave any descendants. I often wonder what those languages recorded that we’ve never seen.
2.
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft of $500 million worth of art on March 18, 1990.
There's a reward of $10 million for return of the stolen art from Boston's museum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_Stewart_Gardner_Museum_theft
1.
D. B. Cooper.
The fact that the moment he jumped out of the 727, nothing about him was ever uncovered again. Did he die? If not, what happened to him?
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