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Some of history’s creepiest mysteries actually have answers.
Welcome to WatchMojo.WORLD, where we’re exploring 10 of the creepiest historical mysteries that have been solved, revealing the shocking truths behind eerie legends, strange events, and spine-chilling mysteries from the past.
Which solved mystery surprised you the most? Share your thoughts in the comments!
Welcome to WatchMojo.WORLD, where we’re exploring 10 of the creepiest historical mysteries that have been solved, revealing the shocking truths behind eerie legends, strange events, and spine-chilling mysteries from the past.
Which solved mystery surprised you the most? Share your thoughts in the comments!
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Short filmTranscript
00:00In one hour, the explosion and the great fire that followed destroy a region of forest the size of Greater London.
00:07People who observed that thought the end of the world had come, judgment day, divine intervention.
00:13Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're counting down our picks for the most disturbing and unsettling historical mysteries that have at least finally been solved.
00:22Plato wrote the story of Atlantis around 360 BCE, just after Haliki was destroyed.
00:3010. The Wiltshire Crop Circles
00:33It's baffled scientists, it's baffled experts, it's even baffled the newspapers.
00:38As far back as the 1600s, strange crop circles are said to have baffled farmers, usually appearing with no entry point into the field itself.
00:47It can seem like whatever causes them must have come in from above, and the leading theory has long been aliens.
00:53Beginning in the 1970s, a particular series of crop circles was discovered in Wiltshire, England,
00:58igniting a decades-long fever of curiosity and panic about extraterrestrials.
01:03However, in 1991, Doug Bauer and Dave Chorley admitted that they were responsible for more than 200 incidents in the area.
01:10So the UFO society here, which was at its height at the time, Warminster especially,
01:15I said they would probably think that it is a UFO that had landed.
01:18With reporters watching on, they showed how they made the patterns using a plank of wood, some rope, and a baseball cap with wire.
01:25So obviously, we speeded that up. It took Doug about 15 minutes to do that particular crop circle.
01:30And he also lays claim to some of the famous ones that we've seen in magazines and books and things.
01:35Number 9, Crystal Skulls.
01:37According to Crystal Skulls enthusiasts, as many as 12 of the 13 authentic skulls have been discovered and are in private collections.
01:46For years, multiple international museums have contained an unusual crystal skull.
01:56The origins of these seeming relics was long unknown, although some believed they dated to pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.
02:03According to one legend, were you to combine 13 skulls in particular,
02:07it would serve to stop the infamous Mayan doomsday event that came and went on December 21, 2012.
02:12There are many who believe that this so-called Reunion of the Skulls will awaken sacred knowledge of the gods.
02:21Knowledge that has been hidden from mankind for thousands of years.
02:25Alongside all the myth and intrigue, however, there's also been doubt.
02:29And in 2008, amidst the hype for the related Indiana Jones movie released at the time,
02:34a number of leading institutions conducted research, including the Musée de Quai Branly in France,
02:39the Smithsonian in the U.S., and the British Museum in the U.K.
02:43They discovered that the skulls likely aren't ancient at all,
02:46and are more likely to have been made in the 20th century, perhaps even post-World War II, and in Europe.
02:53There was simply no doubt in our mind that the Mitchell Hedges skull is the creation of a modern stone carver
03:01using diamond tools, very small drills, and cutting wheels.
03:10Number 8. Tutankhamen's death.
03:12There's this incredible irony that we learn so much about ancient Egypt through Tutankhamen,
03:18but we really know so little about him.
03:22When the tomb of Tutankhamen was discovered in 1922 in the Valley of the Kings,
03:26it marked a monumental day for Egyptologists.
03:29Yet what actually led King Tut to his tomb as a teenager was a mystery.
03:34How did the iconic pharaoh die?
03:36There were several theories, including that he may have fallen off a chariot or that he was murdered,
03:41but nothing with hard evidence.
03:43All we know is that King Tut was alive, and at the age of 19, he was being mummified.
03:50In 2005, however, Tutankhamen's mummified remains were CT scanned,
03:55and it was found that on top of several hereditary issues,
03:58he had suffered a compound fracture to his leg shortly before passing.
04:02Genetic testing found that he was also infected with malaria.
04:05As such, researchers now believe that he was killed by a combination of disease
04:09and the severity of the open and major wound to his leg.
04:12So we can say, without a shadow of a doubt,
04:16that Tut wasn't murdered by a blow to the back of the head?
04:19Sure, 100%.
04:21The CT solved the mystery.
04:23He was not murdered by a blow to the head.
04:26Number 7.
04:26The Sailing Stones
04:28California's Death Valley, known for both extreme heat and cold,
04:32is the land of many mysteries.
04:34One of them seems to be solved at last.
04:36Since the early 1900s, there's been confusion over some seemingly wandering rocks,
04:42most famously along the racetrack playa in California's Death Valley National Park.
04:46Large stones have been shown to move and leave large track marks,
04:50without evidence of interference by humans or animals.
04:53Some as heavy as 700 pounds that move across the desert floor and leave long trails behind them.
04:59They apparently just travel when they want to.
05:02So are and were they perhaps possessed by ghosts?
05:06We now know that that is not the case.
05:08Between December 2013 and January 2014,
05:12several of these stones were fitted with GPS,
05:14and time-lapse photography was used to track them.
05:17They were again found to move great distances,
05:19but it was discovered that they were actually propelled by thin ice sheets
05:22that continually form and break beneath them.
05:25It is a bizarre process, but it is enough to push the rocks and solve the mystery.
05:30When ice breakup takes place, when the ice begins to melt just enough under the light breezes,
05:35that ice, big ice sheets drive the rocks in front of them
05:38and just plow them along the bottom of this shallow pond.
05:43Number six, the Somerton Man.
05:45His identity has eluded police.
05:48But now a potential breakthrough.
05:50A local researcher claims he's solved the puzzle and can finally put a name to the face.
05:55In 1948, the body of a man was found on Somerton Park Beach in Australia.
06:00Lacking identification and dressed in American attire,
06:03he was found to have been in otherwise good health before his passing.
06:06A greater strangeness to the case started to settle in, though,
06:09when a scrap of paper was found in his pocket,
06:12torn from a work by the medieval poet Omar Khayyam.
06:15Investigations led the police to the book from which the scrap was taken,
06:19inside which a coded message was discovered.
06:21It all meshed together to spark a long-running speculation that the unknown man may have been a spy.
06:27In 2022, after analysis of a hair sample, we at last got more details.
06:32Using some of the Somerton Man's hairs, given to the research team in 2011,
06:36they unlocked DNA.
06:38And by comparing that with millions of samples,
06:40given by users of Family Tree databases,
06:43they built a 4,000-person Family Tree.
06:46It was revealed that he was really Carl Charles Webb,
06:50an electrical engineer from Melbourne, born in 1905.
06:53It's fantastic to see this man, an unknown man on a beach, now has a name.
07:00He now has a family.
07:01He now has a place.
07:03Number 5.
07:04The Disappearance of Cheryl Miller and Pamela Jackson.
07:06It was a mystery that followed the city of Vermilion for decades.
07:10In 1971, teenagers Cheryl Miller and Pamela Jackson were on their way to an end-of-school party in South Dakota.
07:17However, they never arrived.
07:18And for decades, it was unknown what had happened to them.
07:21They didn't pack.
07:23They didn't cash their paychecks.
07:25They didn't call home.
07:26None of it makes any sense.
07:28Speculation that something criminal had occurred and that we may never learn the truth was a common theory.
07:32However, in 2013, a severe drought lowered the water level enough in a nearby creek
07:38so that the underside of a car could clearly be seen buried in the mud.
07:41They got the license plate number off it and they realized it was the Studebaker that was missing.
07:49Shockingly, inside the vehicle were human remains.
07:53The following year, DNA analysis concluded that the bodies were those of Miller and Jackson.
07:58The investigation also mentioned that there was no evidence of foul play,
08:01likely indicating that it was a tragic accident.
08:04DCI did a forensic work on the car and was discovered the car was still in gear
08:12and the headlights were still on when it went in.
08:15Number 4.
08:16The Lost City of Haliki
08:17On one terrible night, two and a half thousand years ago,
08:21the entire Greek city of Haliki and all of its people were swept beneath the sea.
08:26Built in the early Bronze Age, the city of Haliki was a major hub in ancient Greek history.
08:31However, in 373 BCE, it vanished from the map.
08:35There were vague accounts that some kind of disaster had unfolded,
08:39but the specifics were never really confirmed.
08:41Centuries later, the Greek geographer Strabo claimed that Poseidon,
08:45the god of the sea, was directly angered by Haliki hoarding a statue of him.
08:49And so, he set off an earthquake, creating a tsunami that sank and destroyed everything.
08:54Naturally, this gave rise to speculation that Haliki could have been the real-life Atlantis.
08:58Plato wrote the story of Atlantis around 360 BCE, just after Haliki was destroyed.
09:06But for millennia, no one knew even where its remains were.
09:10Until, in the early 2000s, archaeologists found evidence of it submerged by an ancient lagoon.
09:16Atlantis or not, we do at least know where Haliki was.
09:20In Plato's tale, the citizens of Atlantis angered the gods who then sent an earthquake
09:25that made Atlantis sink into the sea.
09:29The Haliki legend offers up a direct parallel.
09:33Number 3.
09:34The Connecticut Vampire
09:35In the mid-1800s, the town of Griswold, Connecticut was experiencing an epidemic.
09:41Whole families were falling ill and coughing up blood before dying.
09:44At the time, it was believed that a vampire curse was running rife.
09:48Fast forward to the 1990s, and a grave is discovered nearby with a skeleton laid to rest, unusually.
09:55Its arms are arranged in an X shape, and the severed skull is laid on its chest.
10:00This macabre burial relates to a superstition typically done by fearful people
10:04to stop vampires from coming back to life to feed on the living.
10:07And they had large fieldstone caps over the tops of these crypts.
10:11The fieldstone and the brick crypts, that really seems to argue some idea of keeping them down.
10:17At the time of the Griswold deaths then, the panic must have been extreme.
10:21But in 2019, the true nature of the events was realized.
10:25Following analysis of other skeletons in the area,
10:28it was discovered that the mysterious spate of deaths was really caused by tuberculosis,
10:33rather than vampirism.
10:35Number 2.
10:36The Tunguska Event
10:37In 1908, a massive explosion took place near the Podkhamenea Tunguska River in Siberia, Russia.
10:43In one hour, the explosion and the great fire that followed destroy a region of forest the size of Greater London.
10:51People who observed that thought the end of the world had come, judgment day, divine intervention.
10:57More than 800 square miles of forest was flattened by it, without any clear sign of a cause.
11:02The bang had been detected by seismic stations as far away as Washington, D.C.
11:07And, according to some witnesses, three people may have lost their lives.
11:11It's believed the force of the event was as much as 50 megatons,
11:15which is about as much as the Tsar Bomba, the most powerful weapon ever tested.
11:20At the time, and in the years immediately after,
11:22thousands of scientists tried to explain what happened.
11:25But it wasn't until 1930 that a comet was first suggested.
11:29From there, further evidence mounted up.
11:31And now, it's firmly believed that the Tunguska event was an asteroid that had entered the Earth's atmosphere.
11:36In fact, we now know, since Tunguska, that we are potentially at the center of cosmic impacts.
11:45And they have happened in the past, and they might happen in the future.
11:49It generated a huge airburst, vaporizing itself.
11:52And the shockwave alone was what obliterated the forest.
11:55If it was a meteorite, and the Earth had turned a bit further, it would have destroyed St. Petersburg.
12:02An hour later, it would have destroyed Helsinki.
12:04One hour later, Stockholm, and after that, Oslo.
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12:21In 1867, construction workers at a site in Kasaoka, Japan uncovered ancient human bones.
12:33At a location now known as the Tsukumo Shell Mound, archaeologists got to work.
12:38They discovered evidence of a settlement that dated back to the mid-Jomon period, around 4,000 to 2,500 BCE.
12:44It was a grisly find, though, with some 170 skeletons contained in small graves.
12:50One in particular had a mass of 790 wounds all over their bones, and was missing a hand and leg.
12:57In 2021, researchers reconstructed what happened to this person, and what caused his demise.
13:03We now know that his is the oldest known shark attack death in history.
13:07Fishing equipment and shell jewelry were also found nearby,
13:10as it emerged that Tsukumo No. 24 had unfortunately lost a battle with a shark while hunting.
13:17Which of these mysteries are you only just hearing about for the first time?
13:20And which remaining unsolved problems do you think we may never get answers for?
13:24Let us know in the comments.
13:25The Lost Colony remains this mystery that's at the very heart of the origin of our nation.
13:30People remain fascinated by Roanoke because we know so little about the place.
13:35Did you enjoy this video?
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