World’s Strangest Unsolved Mysteries

The Strange Disappearance of D.B. Cooper

On Wednesday, Nov. 24, 1971, a man identified as Daniel Cooper bought a $20 one-way ticket on Northwest Airlines, Flight 305 from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle, Washington. Cooper was described as being in his mid-40s, wearing a business suit, an overcoat, brown shoes, a white shirt and a black tie. He also carried a briefcase and a brown paper bag.

Before the flight took off, he ordered a bourbon and soda from a flight attendant. After the plane was airborne, Cooper handed the flight attendant a note. At first, she just put it in her pocket without looking at it, but then Cooper told her, “Miss, you better look at that note. I have a bomb.” Cooper then told her the bomb was in his briefcase and asked her to sit next to him. He opened the briefcase to reveal red-colored sticks, surrounded by an array of wires.

Cooper told the flight attendant to write down everything he said and then take it to the Captain. The note said, “I want $200,000 by 5 p.m. in cash exclusively in $20 bills, put in a knapsack. I want two back parachutes and two front parachutes. When we land, I want a fuel truck ready to refuel. No funny stuff or I’ll do the job.”

FBI agents assembled the ransom money from several Seattle-area banks, and Seattle police obtained the parachutes from a local skydiving school.

When Cooper claimed his demands were met, he allowed all passengers and some of the crew to exit the airplane. Cooper told the remaining crew to refuel and chart a course for Mexico City while staying below 10,000 feet.

During the flight, Cooper put on a pair of dark wraparound sunglasses, which would make it into the official sketch and become famous to anyone investigating the case. A little after 8 p.m., and somewhere in between Seattle and Reno, Nevada, Cooper jumped out of the rear door of the plane with two of the parachutes and the money. He was never seen again.

Despite an expansive manhunt and decades of searching, no conclusions have been made as to the man’s identity or his fate after he jumped. It is called one of the greatest cold cases in FBI and U.S. history.

The Body on Somerton Beach

In December 1948, a body was found on Somerton Beach in Adelaide, Australia. The body was a man who was dressed impeccably in a suit with polished shoes, and his head was slumped against a wall. Authorities thought the cause of death was heart failure or more likely poisoning, but no trace of poison was found in the autopsy.

There wasn’t a wallet or any type of identification on the man, and all the tags from his clothing were cut out. The fingerprints that the authorities took of him were also unidentifiable. They even put a photo of the body in the newspapers, and still, no one could identify who the man was.

Four months later, after the body was found, detectives found a hidden pocket that was sewn on the inside of his trousers. Inside was a rolled-up piece of paper from a rare book called the Rubáiyát. The piece of paper had the words “Tamám Shud” on it, which means “it has ended.”

After months of looking for the exact book, the authorities decided to bury the Somerton Man without identification. However, a cast was taken of the bust, and he was embalmed for preservation purposes.

Eight months later, a man walked into the police station. He claimed that just after the body was found, he discovered a copy of the Rubáiyát in the back of his car that he kept parked near Somerton Beach. He thought nothing of it until he read about the search in a newspaper article. Sure enough, the book had a part of the final page that was torn, and it matched the piece of paper that was found in the Somerton Man’s trousers. Inside the book was a phone number and some sort of strange code.

The phone number led the authorities to a woman named Jessica Thompson who lived nearby. During her interview, she was very evasive and even claimed she was going to faint when she saw the bust of the Somerton Man but denied knowing him. However, she said she did sell the book to a man named Alfred Boxall.

Unfortunately, Alfred Boxall was still very much alive at the time and still had the copy of the Rubáiyát that Jessica had sold him. The code that was found ended up being even more unhelpful, and as of today, it has yet to be cracked.

While the man on Somerton Beach was later identified as Carl “Charles” Webb (via DNA testing), an electrical engineer born in 1905, the circumstances surrounding his death remain a complete mystery.

Wall Street Bombing of 1920

During the lunch rush on Wall Street, in September 1920, a nondescript man driving a cart pressed an old horse forward in front of the U.S. Assay Office, across from the J. P. Morgan building. He stopped his cart, got down and immediately disappeared into the crowd.

Minutes later, the cart exploded into a hail of metal fragments, immediately killing more than 30 people and injuring 300. The aftermath was horrific, and the death toll rose as the day wore on and more victims succumbed to their injuries.

In the beginning, it wasn’t obvious that the explosion was an intentional act of terrorism; it was viewed as simply an accident. Maintenance crews cleaned up the damage overnight and discarded any physical evidence that would have been crucial to identifying the perpetrator. By the next morning, Wall Street was back in business.

Conspiracy theories were abundant, but the New York Police and Fire Departments, the Bureau of Investigation (the FBI’s predecessor) and the U.S. Secret Service were on the job to find out the truth. Each lead was actively pursued, and the Bureau interviewed hundreds of people who had been around that area before, during and after the attack, but collected very little information.

The few recollections of the driver and wagon were vague and useless. The NYPD was able to reconstruct the bomb and its fuse mechanism, but there was much debate about the nature of the explosive.

However, the most promising lead had actually come prior to the explosion. A mailman had found four crudely spelled and printed flyers in the Wall Street area from a group calling itself the “American Anarchist Fighters” that demanded the release of political prisoners.

The letters seemed similar to those used the previous year in two bombing campaigns, which were led by Italian Anarchists. The Bureau investigated up and down the East Coast to trace the printing of these flyers, but they were unsuccessful.

Based on bomb attacks over the previous decade, the Bureau initially suspected followers of the Italian Anarchist Luigi Galleani had committed the crime. But the case couldn’t be proved, and Galleani had already fled the country. Over the next three years, hot leads turned cold and promising trails turned into dead ends. In the end, the bombers were never identified.

Voynich Manuscript

Named after the Polish American antiquarian bookseller Wilfrid M. Voynich, who acquired it in 1912, the Voynich Manuscript is a detailed 240-page book written in a language or script that is completely unknown.

Its pages are also filled with colorful drawings of strange diagrams, odd events, and plants that do not seem to match any known species, adding to the intrigue of the document and the difficulty of deciphering it. The original author of the manuscript remains unknown, but carbon dating has revealed that its pages were made sometime between 1404 and 1438. It has been called "the world's most mysterious manuscript."

Theories abound about the origin and nature of the manuscript. Some, like historian and artist Nicholas Gibbs, believe it was meant to be a pharmacopeia, to address topics in medieval or early modern medicine. In an essay for the Times Literary Supplement, Gibbs writes that it's "a reference book of selected remedies lifted from the standard treatises of the medieval period, an instruction manual for the health and wellbeing of the more well to do women in society, which was quite possibly tailored to a single individual."

Many of the pictures of herbs and plants hint that the manuscript may have been some kind of textbook for an alchemist. The fact that many diagrams appear to be of astronomical origin, combined with the unidentifiable biological drawings, has even led some fanciful theorists to propose that the book may have an alien origin.

Most theorists agree that the book is unlikely to be a hoax, given the amount of time, money, and detail required to make it.

Kryptos

Kryptos is a mysterious encrypted sculpture designed by artist Jim Sanborn which sits right outside the headquarters of the CIA in Langley, Virginia. It's so mysterious, in fact, that not even the CIA has completely cracked the code.

The sculpture contains four inscriptions, and although three of them have been cracked, the forth remains elusive. In 2006, Sanborn let slip that there are clues in the first inscriptions to the last one, and in 2010 he released another clue: The Letters 64–69 NYPVTT in part four encode the text BERLIN.

Think you have what it takes to solve it?

Beale Ciphers

The Beale Ciphers are a set of three ciphertexts that supposedly reveal the location of one of the grandest buried treasures in U.S. history: thousands of pounds of gold, silver, and jewels worth roughly $43 million as of 2017. The treasure was originally obtained by a mysterious man named Thomas Jefferson Beale in 1818 while prospecting in Colorado.

Of the three ciphertexts, only the second one has been cracked (pictured). Interestingly, the U.S. Declaration of Independence turned out to be the key—a curious fact given that Beale shares his name with the author of the Declaration of Independence.

The cracked text does reveal the county where the treasure was buried: Bedford County, Virginia, but its exact location is likely encrypted in one of the other uncracked ciphers. To this day, treasure hunters scour the Bedford County hillsides digging (often illegally) for the loot.

Phaistos Disc

The mystery of the Phaistos Disc is a story that sounds like something out of an Indiana Jones movie.3 Discovered by Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier in 1908 in the Minoan palace site of Phaistos, the disc is made of fired clay and contains mysterious symbols that may represent an unknown form of hieroglyphics. It is believed that it was designed sometime in the second millennium B.C.

Some scholars believe that the hieroglyphs resemble symbols of Linear A and Linear B, scripts once used in ancient Crete. The only problem? Linear A also eludes decipherment.

Today the disc remains one of the most famous puzzles of archaeology.

Shugborough Inscription

Look from afar at the 18th-century Shepherd's Monument in Staffordshire, England, and you might take it as nothing more than a sculpted re-creation of Nicolas Poussin's famous painting, "Arcadian Shepherds." Look closer, though, and you'll notice a curious sequence of letters: DOUOSVAVVM — a code that eluded solutions for over 250 years.

Though the identity of the code carver remains a mystery, some have speculated that the code could be a clue left behind by the Knights Templar about the whereabouts of the Holy Grail.

Many of the world's greatest minds have tried to crack the code and failed, including Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin.

Tamam Shud Case

Considered to be one of Australia's most profound mysteries, the Tamam Shud Case revolves around an unidentified man found dead in December 1948 on Somerton Beach in Adelaide, Australia.4 Aside from the fact that the man could never be identified, the mystery deepened after a tiny piece of paper with the words "Tamam Shud" was found in a hidden pocket sewn within the dead man's trousers. (It is also referred to as "Taman Shud.")

The phrase translates as "ended" or "finished" and is a phrase used on the last page of a collection of poems called "The Rubaiyat" by Omar Khayyam. Adding to the mystery, a copy of Khayyam's collection was later found that contained a scribbled code (pictured) in it believed to have been left by the dead man himself.

Due to the content of the Khayyam poem, many have come to believe that the message may represent a suicide note of sorts, but it remains uncracked, as does the case.

The Wow! Signal

Photo: Big Ear Radio Observatory and North American AstroPhysical Observatory/Wikimedia Commons

One summer night in 1977, Jerry Ehman, a volunteer for SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, may have become the first man ever to receive an intentional message from an alien world. Ehman was scanning radio waves from deep space, hoping to randomly come across a signal that bore the hallmarks of one that might be sent by intelligent aliens, when he saw his measurements spike.

The signal lasted for 72 seconds, the longest period of time it could possibly be measured by the array that Ehman was using. It was loud and appeared to have been transmitted from a place no human has gone before: in the constellation Sagittarius near a star called Tau Sagittarii, 120 light years away.

Ehman wrote the words "Wow!" on the original printout of the signal, thus its title as the "Wow! Signal."

All attempts to locate the signal again have failed, leading to much controversy and mystery about its origins and its meaning. In 2017, a team of researchers suggested the signal was from a previously unidentified comet.

The Zodiac Letters

The Zodiac Letters are a series of four encrypted messages believed to have been written by the famous Zodiac Killer, a serial killer who terrorized residents of the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The letters were likely written as a way to taunt journalists and police, and though one of the messages has been deciphered, the three others, like the cipher at the bottom of this letter, remain uncracked.

The identity of the Zodiac Killer also remains a mystery, though no Zodiac murders have been identified since 1970.

Georgia Guidestones

The Georgia Guidestones, sometimes referred to as the "American Stonehenge," is a granite monument erected in Elbert County, Georgia, in 1979. The stones are engraved in eight languages—English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian—each relaying 10 "new" commandments for "an Age of Reason." The stones also line up with certain astronomical features.

Though the monument contains no encrypted messages, its purpose and origin remain shrouded in mystery. They were commissioned by a man who has yet to be properly identified, who went by the pseudonym of R.C. Christian.

Of the 10 commandments, the first one is perhaps the most controversial: "Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature." Many have taken it to be a license to cull the human population down to the specified number, and critics of the stones have called for them to be destroyed. Some conspiracy theorists even believe they may have been designed by a "Luciferian secret society" calling for a new world order.

Rongorongo

Rongorongo is a system of mysterious glyphs discovered written on various artifacts on Easter Island. Many believe they represent a lost system of writing or proto-writing and could be one of just three or four independent inventions of writing in human history.

The glyphs remain undecipherable, and their true messages—which some believe could offer hints about the perplexing collapse of the statue-building Easter Island civilization—may be lost forever.

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