Creepy Unsolved (preferably paranormal) Mysteries.

Bermuda Triangle? It isn't so surprising that many ships are lost, seeing as how its one of the busiest shipping lanes on the planet and also happens to be in the path of most hurricanes. If you break it down by % ships lost instead of number, it is actually not significantly more dangerous than any shipping lane.

Indian Triangle though, that's a different beast - specifically, the naga that live on the ocean floor don't like trespasssssers into their domain.

edited 14th Nov '11 9:19:24 PM by MyGodItsFullofStars

As if Australia wasn't deadly enough...

edited 14th Nov '11 9:44:49 PM by Colonial1.1

Doesn't the Bermuda Triangle have some kind of weird magnetic bullshit going on, coupled with weird underwater bubble spouts, that accounts for the rather unusual crashing of planes and sinking of ships in otherwise acceptable weather?

No, the Bermuda triangle is actually mildly safer than other random places. It just gets a lot of traffic so naturally it gets more traffic accidents.

And then there's Bruce Gernon. Granted, he's the only person I've heard of to claim such an encounter, but I'm also not willing to accuse people of lying.

I read a book on the Bermuda Triangle back in the days of middle school. It described some weird shit, such as ghost planes kamikazying ships only to disappear right before impact, a pilot that reported flying over an island with mammoths and junk on it, USO's (that's Unidentified Submerged Object) and a cauliflower shaped thingy that was seen rising out of the water before suddenly collapsing on itself.

I don't remember the title of the book, although I believe it was a pretty famous book on the subject. I also haven't seen any other documentation of the stuff covered in the book.

Lead Masks. Very weird.

They were probably involved in some illegal shit (smuggling radioactive materials?)

Most of what you're gonna read or hear about the Bermuda Triangle is bullshit, fabrication, fraud, and sensationalism. None of the supposedly supernatural events have been confirmed, and many of the more eccentric disappearances were never recorded anywhere.

It's a very strongly trafficked area; obviously there have been plenty of disasters, but no more than the average for that amount of traffic.

To me, it looks more like a ritual suicide. You know, "take this capsule and your soul will be carried away beyond the Milky Way, but remember to take a lead mask, as the UFO is radioactive and you don't want your brain to suffer from it, because that's where your soul is."

That kind of stuff happened depressingly often in the previous century.

edited 15th Nov '11 8:28:24 AM by BestOf

'I also haven't seen any other documentation of the stuff covered in the book. '

That's kind of a really bad sign.

To elaborate on the end of my previous post, Heaven's Gate welcomes you to its warm embrace.

As far as I know, the Bloop was exploited by the Cloverfield film, in viral marketing or other promotional stuff.

Also one of the Most Triumphant examples, the "Mary Celeste" and other ghost ships.

The Taman Shud Case? I first read about it on Cracked.com, and it always kind of freaked me out.

edited 15th Nov '11 9:14:41 AM by BlueIris

I love the Roman Dodecahedrons. They look like toys!

There's also the Starving of Saqqara, but I'm pretty sure that's more of an 'artists could be eccentric in ancient times too' type thing.

edited 15th Nov '11 9:28:27 AM by Katrika

I'm a sucker for an uncrackable code, and The Voynich Manuscript is a wonderfully bizarre one.

I'm also a sucker for weird meteorological phenomenon, and New England's Dark Day is a great example, even though it's got pretty mundane reasoning behind it. I mean, it must have felt like it was the end of the world to some people.

There's also Star Rot, in the category of 'freaky things falling out of the sky'.

Voynich manuscript is a science journal left behind by Elf explorers from Niflheim. One of the inserts clearly depicts the nine worlds and the rainbow bridges wormholes that connect them. Also, the plants are from the Elf-realm, which is why they do not match up with any known Earth varieties.

Seriously, they should do a genetic analysis on the ink and vellum, just to make sure that they aren't from species not of this world.

...

Anything else like the undecipherable text?

Well, it's possible the script on the Starved is the only surviving remains of a certain written language. I think that's the proposed theory.

I'm surprised I hadn't heard about Harold Holt, considering that he was the leader of an entire first world nation.

When I was at the cemetery the other month, I actually went and took a picture of the Harold Holt memorial.

I found it rather ironic that the choice of words below his name was "He loved the sea".

The Voynich Manuscript is generally believed to be either a very dense alchemist's cypher or a procedurally-generated nonsense language (if it's that, it's not the only example).

Alchemist's cypher?

Wikipedia's list on unsolved mysteries wasn't as interesting as I hoped it would be. Most of the ones of which I hadn't previously heard* were missing persons, which I generally don't find very interesting, as the chance of the solution to the mystery being anything really surprising or interesting is rather small, as opposed to phenomena like the BLOOP and Quacker, both of which have many proposed explanations that are interesting to me.

*I know, bad grammar. For some reason, this feels more correct that "...ones which I hadn't heard of." Now, the word order I used actually is correct, but compared to how the language is actually used and what is commonly accepted, I should be comfortable accepting the more common word order. I don't know why I continue to use the more obscure word order, but I can't seem to get rid of that habit, despite knowing that it's bad style.

Physics and chemistry used to be known as "Natural Philosophy," which of course makes sense when you consider the definitions of "nature" and "philosophy." Before the emergence and rise to prominence of the scientific method, alchemy was the discipline of what we consider physicists and chemists, including the likes of Isaac Newton.

Alchemists made tremendous scientific progress, but their methods weren't anywhere near as productive as we expect of today's scientists. Magical and spiritual explanations of natural phenomena were not frowned upon, and so alchemists came up with very imaginative (and blatantly unscientific by today's standards) hypotheses regarding the origins of natural phenomena.

Sometimes, the Church had an accepted doctrine that included a hypothesis about a particular phenomenon. When an alchemist came up with another hypothesis, conflicting with the accepted one, and published it, they ran the risk of getting persecuted for blasphemy or made-up charges of Satan worship, witchcraft, homosexuality, etc.

This is why many (if not most) of the more out-there alchemical papers were ciphered, so that only their intended audience (other alchemists) could read it. This way, even if the paper was confiscated by the authorities, the "knowledge" in it was safe, as was the person who wrote it (under a pen name) and the person who had it when they were caught, though in the latter case, the added safety of the cypher might've been very minor, as mediaeval courts, when they were held, weren't very good at actually carrying out justice.

edited 16th Nov '11 5:10:56 PM by BestOf

Colonial: In other words, it's an alchemy book written in code. Medieval alchemists were big on that sort of thing.

I think the nonsense explanation is more likely though.

Best Of: Ever heard of the Talman Shud case?

And to anyone looking to find unsolved mysteries, Unexplained Mysteries is a great resource as long as you're not expecting unbiased journalism. The entire site (including its founder) is very quick to disregard any evidence against a particular theory or inexplicable occurrence. There're also a fair bit of racists and homophobes on the forums.

I'm not sure; I'm gonna look it up now.

I'm also posting to point out that I updated my previous post, which was ninja'd: I hope that the explanation I gave of the term "alchemist's cypher" is useful.

OK, I re-read the Wikipedia article (yes, I had read it before; I just didn't recognise the name.)

I think it's fairly obvious that he was a spy, and my guess is that he was British.

The most obvious clue is the code that he was apparently deciphering. I'm guessing he was using the signal from a numbers station (if you don't know what those are, it might be a good idea to avoid reading about them or listening to them just before going to bed, though I personally don't find them creepy, just curious.) The message that a numbers station relays is assumed by some (including me) to spell out a message in a text that is only known to the spy in the field and the people in the operation HQ who agreed on what text to use. Of course, the message itself is also in code, so simply having the rights book (or other text) from which to look up your letters isn't enough; you also need a pre-agreed code book to read the lines.

He had on him nothing with which he could be identified, and he was likely using a fake name. The labels from the clothes and the suitcase that was discovered later were removed, except the ones that probably held a fake name of no significance. The police said he looked British, and he had on him British tobacco that wasn't sold anywhere else. His jacket was American, as was his comb; but I'm attaching more significance to the cigarettes, as they are more likely to have been acquired by him personally and not by his operators.

Of course, I'm only speculating, and there's nothing in what I've said here that you won't find in Wikipedia.

I skimmed some parts of the article on the Taman Shud Case when I read it just now, and I'm currently reading some of the bits I skipped. It turns out that flowers appeared on the guy's grave for some time after his burial. Now, this could be just some local person who was interested in the case when they read about it in the paper and decided to bring flowers for a person that no one might remember. But I don't think that sounds like a really common phenomenon, so I'm not gonna go with that. I think it's more likely that someone in the area cared about the guy and brought flowers; now, that's a clue regarding the identity of the body, if only it was ever discovered who brought the flowers.

To advance the spy tangent, here's a mystery that strictly speaking hasn't been officially solved: the Numbers Stations, to which I already referred in my speculation about the identity of the Taman Shud body.

Here's an interesting clandestine operation that the British carried out in WWII to pull the Germans' leg. It's not an actual mystery, but I'm just dropping the link here in case anyone's interested, and don't intend to elaborate on it.

Similarly, Operation Gladio is now relatively well-known for a clandestine operation, but most of you probably haven't heard of it, so I'm just gonna leave this link here and let you read it if you're into this stuff and ignore it if you wanna stay on topic.

edited 16th Nov '11 6:10:21 PM by BestOf