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History's darkest puzzles have finally been cracked! Join us as we count down our picks for the creepiest historical mysteries that science and research have finally solved. From ancient shark attack victims to vanishing cities, these once-baffling enigmas kept investigators guessing for decades—sometimes centuries—before modern technology revealed their secrets.
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00:00For years, it was assumed that this was fiction, or at the best, rather dubious folklore.
00:07Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're counting down our picks for the most unsettling enigmas
00:12throughout history that we've finally gotten some answers to.
00:15The Tunguska disaster changed our view of the world.
00:22Number 20, the Pearl Harbor Ghost Plane.
00:24Just a year after the infamous 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor,
00:28an unidentified plane was supposedly making its way towards the base.
00:32The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked.
00:37Thinking it was another strike, two aircraft investigated,
00:40reportedly seeing a bullet-riddled American P-40 Warhawk flown by an injured pilot.
00:45After a final wave, he intentionally crashed and then disappeared.
00:49The mystery gained traction when it was featured in Damned to Glory,
00:52a book written by Colonel Robert Scott Jr.
00:54Many assumed he was retelling a historical event and took it as fact.
00:59Years later, Scott confirmed that it was fiction,
01:01and that he would have never done it had he known what the outcome would be.
01:04Now, it serves as a lesson for one not to believe everything they read.
01:08I'm going after him.
01:11Number 19, the Bloop.
01:13In 1997, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
01:17detected an odd, loud noise coming from the depths of the Pacific Ocean.
01:29It was nicknamed Bloop.
01:31From that moment on, it caused debate within the scientific community.
01:34Some experts were adamant that it had been made by an animal,
01:37but the only way that would have been possible
01:39was if the creature responsible was even larger than a whale.
01:42Some were convinced that we had accidentally stumbled across
01:45a gargantuan, never-before-seen sea monster.
01:54In 2005, however, the truth came out.
01:57The Bloop hadn't been made by a living being,
01:59but rather an iceberg splitting apart and causing an icequake.
02:03But it's the booming of the ground expanding as the water rapidly freezes.
02:08While not as exciting as an unknown creature,
02:10it brought an answer to a nearly decade-old mystery.
02:13Number 18, Wellman.
02:15When skeletal remains were found in a Norse well in 1938,
02:19no one realized just how much history they had stumbled upon.
02:22In central Norway lies the remains of the medieval Sferisborg Castle,
02:26built around 1180 CE.
02:28And in the 1930s, excavations of these ruins revealed a corpse
02:32at the bottom of a well from within the castle walls.
02:35The site was properly searched in the mid-2010s
02:38when a full skeleton was found.
02:40For another decade, there was seemingly endless speculation
02:43about Wellman's odd burial ground.
02:45The answer ended up being in an 800-year-old text
02:48known as the Sferis Saga.
02:50These sagas are part of an incredibly durable storytelling tradition in Iceland,
02:54passed down through the centuries and shared with their neighbors.
02:57According to the document,
02:59Wellman was a corpse that had been thrown into the waterway in 1197
03:02by King Sferis Sigurdsson in an attempt to poison the citizens there.
03:06DNA testing corroborated the timeline, bringing new legitimacy to the saga.
03:11Though his final resting place is explained,
03:13not much else about him is known.
03:15But hopefully, further research will reveal even more.
03:18So thank you, Wellman.
03:20I'm sure you would have wanted things to end differently,
03:22but you truly became the stuff of legends.
03:25Legends that have since been nicely corroborated with the help of modern science.
03:29Number 17. The Windsor Hum.
03:32In 2011, citizens in Ontario, Canada suddenly began to report a constant droning noise.
03:46According to them, it was seemingly never-ending
03:49and sometimes so loud that it was impossible to ignore.
03:55The phenomenon was dubbed the Windsor Hum.
03:59And researchers began locating its source.
04:02Some speculated it was originating from the nearby Zug Island,
04:05but were barred access by the United States.
04:07Both the mystery and the sound continued relentlessly
04:10until the onset of the pandemic in 2020.
04:13A U.S. steel plant in Zug Island had been shut down due to it,
04:16and with it went the hum.
04:18It was then revealed that blast furnaces had been operated at an extremely high capacity,
04:22creating the noise that had haunted thousands for years.
04:25All we have to do is have somebody come up and say,
04:28yeah, okay, we're making a noise, we're working on muffling it,
04:32and we don't think we can fix it.
04:34We're sorry.
04:35And then we're happy.
04:36Number 16. The Fate of the Franklin Expedition.
04:39In 1845, Sir John Franklin embarked on a journey
04:42to explore the remainder of the Northwest Passage near northern Canada.
04:46Finding a shortcut to Asia would allow European merchants access
04:49to the coveted silver, gold, spices, and silk of India and China.
04:54Two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, left, but neither would return.
04:59They were trapped for over a year, resulting in two dozen dying
05:02and the ships being left as survivors attempted to finish on foot before disappearing.
05:07Twelve years later, during a search expedition,
05:10a note is found at Victory Point on King William Island in northern Canada.
05:14The note is from the Franklin Expedition.
05:17Since then, small discoveries have helped solve these mysteries.
05:20For example, the men primarily perished due to natural causes,
05:23from food infected with botulism to starvation.
05:26Erebus and Terror were found in 2014 and 2016,
05:30with the latter being found in such good condition
05:32that it debunked a theory that they'd been crushed by ice.
05:35As more remains are identified, the more we uncover the full story.
05:39Many mysteries surrounding the Franklin Expedition remain unsolved.
05:44But historians will continue to study the once-vanished ships
05:47to uncover the truth about what happened to the men of the fateful Franklin Expedition.
05:53Number 15.
05:54The Wow Signal
05:54When news of this odd signal detection was announced in the late 1970s,
05:58it seemed as though there was finally concrete proof of life beyond our planet.
06:02Do you hear that?
06:03That whistle, Sarah?
06:04Yeah.
06:05The rightfully named Wow Signal was short yet intense,
06:10lasting just over a minute and resonating with believers and detractors alike.
06:14Several theories were posited,
06:16ranging from alien communication to an accidental transmission from the United States military.
06:20The wavelength was 21 centimeters.
06:23That's the wavelength of light, of radio waves emitted from hydrogen atoms.
06:29A report in 2024 finally brought about answers.
06:32And while it isn't extraterrestrial life, it is just as remarkable.
06:36Experts claimed that the frequency had most likely come about
06:39when a hydrogen cloud crossed paths with a powerful star,
06:42creating a large reaction and loud noise that had been picked up that fateful night in 1977.
06:47So, astronomically speaking, when you look at the universe,
06:50for these things to all be in the same place, it's one in a billion.
06:54Number 14.
06:55Vitruppmann
06:56The discovery of corpses in bogs has allowed historians to get a glimpse
07:00into the lives of those who lived before us.
07:02One known as the Vitruppmann was uncovered in a Danish village of the same name in 1915.
07:07Vitruppmann's DNA revealed that he was genetically very different
07:11from the rest of the prehistoric population of Denmark that existed at that time.
07:15His 5,200-year-old remains were found next to a club,
07:19making it clear that he had been bludgeoned to death.
07:21In 2024, a bombshell was dropped.
07:24He wasn't from Denmark at all.
07:26He had grown up in the Scandinavian peninsula and traveled there in adulthood.
07:30Some believe he was brought over as a slave
07:32and used as an unwilling participant in a human sacrifice,
07:35explaining his abnormally violent fate.
07:37With this in mind, further research will help us learn about him
07:41and ancient human migration as well.
07:43Number 13.
07:43Lady in the Dunes
07:45Since the discovery of her corpse in 1974,
07:48her identity and killer remained a burning question
07:51in the minds of officials and her loved ones.
07:53The then-dubbed Lady in the Dunes had been found with cranial trauma and no hands,
07:58implying that her killer had taken them.
08:00At the time, the cause of death was determined to be a blow to the head
08:04and is estimated to have occurred several weeks prior.
08:08Her body was exhumed three times during the investigation,
08:11but nothing concrete was found.
08:13Hope was reignited in 2022 when her skeletal remains were matched with a relative of hers,
08:18allowing her to finally be identified as Ruth Terry.
08:21That same year, they had their first true suspect,
08:25Guy Moldavin, Terry's ex-husband.
08:27Though he had passed away two decades prior,
08:29he was officially named her murderer in 2023,
08:32finally bringing her family the answers they had waited decades for.
08:36The DA says Moldavin is also the prime suspect
08:39in the disappearance of another earlier wife and stepdaughter in Seattle in 1960.
08:44Number 12.
08:45Caspar Hauser
08:46In 1828, he stumbled into now-modern-day Nuremberg and history as a whole.
08:52Caspar Hauser immediately sparked several questions with his arrival.
08:59He claimed to have been imprisoned his entire upbringing
09:04and that he had never interacted with another human before his sudden release.
09:09Soon, rumors about his origins popped up.
09:11The most prominent was one asserting he was born to the royal Baden lineage
09:14and accidentally swapped out at birth.
09:17This theory was circulated until DNA tests were carried out
09:20in the 20th and 21st centuries,
09:22when it was found that he had no connection to the bloodline,
09:25though he remains an enigma to this day.
09:27This deduction remains one of the biggest strides in finding out the truth about him.
09:31Your majesty is less than me than my life.
09:38Number 11.
09:39Anastasia's Fate
09:40The killing of the Romanov family in 1918 was a historical turning point.
09:44Yet one question lingered.
09:46The whereabouts of Grand Duchess Anastasia.
09:48It was unclear whether she had died during the initial attack or if she had escaped,
09:52causing decades of debate.
09:54In 1989,
09:55Yurovsky publishes an official report about the Romanov execution
09:59with tantalizing details to further stoke the possibility
10:03of Anastasia and her brother's survival.
10:05The mystery was bolstered by people pretending to be her,
10:08the bodies being left unattended for a period of time post-murder,
10:11and only nine of the 11 bodies being found following the excavation of their mass grave.
10:17In 2007, two more were found nearby,
10:20and DNA testing matched them to the two remaining members of the family.
10:23While scientists aren't sure whether Anastasia's remains were in the larger or smaller group,
10:27they do know for sure that she perished along with her relatives.
10:31But with all seven Romanov remains now accounted for
10:34and identified through mitochondrial DNA testing,
10:38the possibility of Anastasia's escape comes to an end.
10:42Number 10.
10:43The Wiltshire Crop Circles
10:44It's baffled scientists,
10:46it's baffled experts,
10:47it's even baffled the newspapers.
10:49As far back as the 1600s,
10:51strange crop circles are said to have baffled farmers,
10:54usually appearing with no entry point into the field itself.
10:57It can seem like whatever causes them must have come in from above.
11:01And the leading theory has long been aliens.
11:04Beginning in the 1970s,
11:05a particular series of crop circles was discovered in Wiltshire, England,
11:09igniting a decades-long fever of curiosity and panic about extraterrestrials.
11:14However, in 1991,
11:16Doug Bauer and Dave Chorley admitted that they were responsible for more than 200 incidents in the area.
11:21So the UFO society here, which was at its height at the time,
11:24Warminster especially,
11:25I said they would probably think that it is a UFO that had landed.
11:29With reporters watching on,
11:31they showed how they made the patterns using a plank of wood,
11:33some rope,
11:34and a baseball cap with wire.
11:36So obviously we speeded that up.
11:37It took Doug about 15 minutes to do that particular crop circle.
11:41And he also lays claim to some of the famous ones that we've seen in magazines and books and things.
11:45Number 9.
11:46Crystal Skulls
11:47According to Crystal Skulls Enthusiasts,
11:50as many as 12 of the 13 authentic skulls have been discovered and are in private collections.
11:58But where did these so-called authentic skulls come from?
12:01For years, multiple international museums have contained an unusual crystal skull.
12:06The origins of these seeming relics was long unknown,
12:10although some believed they dated to pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.
12:13According to one legend,
12:15were you to combine 13 skulls in particular,
12:18it would serve to stop the infamous Mayan doomsday event that came and went on December 21st, 2012.
12:23There are many who believe that this so-called reunion of the skulls
12:28will awaken sacred knowledge of the gods,
12:31knowledge that has been hidden from mankind for thousands of years.
12:36Alongside all the myth and intrigue, however,
12:38there's also been doubt.
12:40And in 2008,
12:41amidst the hype for the related Indiana Jones movie released at the time,
12:45a number of leading institutions conducted research,
12:48including the Musée de Quai Branly in France,
12:50the Smithsonian in the US,
12:52and the British Museum in the UK.
12:54They discovered that the skulls likely aren't ancient at all,
12:57and are more likely to have been made in the 20th century,
13:00perhaps even post-World War II,
13:03and in Europe.
13:04There was simply no doubt in our mind that the Mitchell Hedgen skull
13:07is the creation of a modern stone carver
13:12using diamond tools,
13:16very small drills,
13:18and cutting wheels.
13:20Number 8.
13:21Tutankhamen's death.
13:22There's this incredible irony
13:24that we learn so much about ancient Egypt
13:27through Tutankhamen,
13:30but we really know so little about him.
13:33When the tomb of Tutankhamen was discovered in 1922
13:35in the Valley of the Kings,
13:37it marked a monumental day for Egyptologists.
13:40Yet what actually led King Tut to his tomb as a teenager
13:43was a mystery.
13:44How did the iconic pharaoh die?
13:46There were several theories,
13:48including that he may have fallen off a chariot
13:50or that he was murdered,
13:52but nothing with hard evidence.
13:54All we know is that King Tut was alive,
13:57and at the age of 19,
13:59he was being mummified.
14:01In 2005, however,
14:03Tutankhamen's mummified remains were CT scanned,
14:05and it was found that on top of several hereditary issues,
14:09he had suffered a compound fracture to his leg shortly before passing.
14:13Genetic testing found that he was also infected with malaria.
14:16As such,
14:17researchers now believe that he was killed by a combination of disease
14:20and the severity of the open and major wound to his leg.
14:23So we can say,
14:24without a shadow of a doubt,
14:27that Tut wasn't murdered by a blow to the back of the head,
14:30as it's been suggested.
14:31Sure, 100%.
14:32The CT solved the mystery.
14:34He was not murdered by a blow to the head.
14:39California's Death Valley,
14:40known for both extreme heat and cold,
14:42is the land of many mysteries.
14:44One of them seems to be solved at last.
14:47Since the early 1900s,
14:49there's been confusion over some seemingly wandering rocks,
14:53most famously along the racetrack playa
14:55in California's Death Valley National Park.
14:57Large stones have been shown to move and leave large track marks,
15:01without evidence of interference by humans or animals.
15:04Some as heavy as 700 pounds,
15:06that move across the desert floor
15:08and leave long trails behind them.
15:10They apparently just travel when they want to.
15:12So are and were they perhaps possessed by ghosts?
15:16We now know that that is not the case.
15:19Between December 2013 and January 2014,
15:22several of these stones were fitted with GPS,
15:25and time-lapse photography was used to track them.
15:28They were again found to move great distances,
15:30but it was discovered that they were actually propelled by thin ice sheets
15:33that continually form and break beneath them.
15:35It is a bizarre process,
15:37but it is enough to push the rocks and solve the mystery.
15:40When ice breakup takes place,
15:42when the ice begins to melt just enough under the light breezes,
15:46that ice, big ice sheets drive the rocks in front of them
15:49and just plow them along the bottom of this shallow pond.
15:54Number 6.
15:55The Somerton Man
15:56His identity has eluded police.
15:58But now, a potential breakthrough.
16:01A local researcher claims he's solved the puzzle
16:03and can finally put a name to the face.
16:06In 1948, the body of a man was found on Somerton Park Beach in Australia.
16:11Lacking identification and dressed in American attire,
16:14he was found to have been in otherwise good health before his passing.
16:17A greater strangeness to the case started to settle in, though,
16:20when a scrap of paper was found in his pocket,
16:22torn from a work by the medieval poet Omar Khayyam.
16:26Investigations led the police to the book from which the scrap was taken,
16:29inside which a coded message was discovered.
16:32It all meshed together to spark a long-running speculation
16:35that the unknown man may have been a spy.
16:37In 2022, after analysis of a hair sample,
16:40we at last got more details.
16:42Using some of the Somerton Man's hairs,
16:45given to the research team in 2011,
16:47they unlocked DNA.
16:49And by comparing that with millions of samples,
16:51given by users of Family Tree databases,
16:54they built a 4,000-person Family Tree.
16:57It was revealed that he was really Carl Charles Webb,
17:00an electrical engineer from Melbourne, born in 1905.
17:04It's fantastic to see this man,
17:07an unknown man on a beach, now has a name.
17:10He now has a family.
17:12He now has a place.
17:13Number five.
17:14The disappearance of Cheryl Miller and Pamela Jackson.
17:17It was a mystery that followed the city of Vermilion for decades.
17:21In 1971, teenagers Cheryl Miller and Pamela Jackson
17:24were on their way to an end-of-school party in South Dakota.
17:27However, they never arrived.
17:29And for decades, it was unknown what had happened to them.
17:32They didn't pack.
17:33They didn't cash their paychecks.
17:35They didn't call home.
17:37None of it makes any sense.
17:39Speculation that something criminal had occurred
17:41and that we may never learn the truth was a common theory.
17:43However, in 2013,
17:45a severe drought lowered the water level enough in a nearby creek
17:48so that the underside of a car could clearly be seen buried in the mud.
17:52They got the license plate number off it
17:54and they realized it was the Studebaker that was missing.
18:00Shockingly, inside the vehicle were human remains.
18:03The following year,
18:04DNA analysis concluded that the bodies were those of Miller and Jackson.
18:08The investigation also mentioned that there was no evidence of foul play,
18:12likely indicating that it was a tragic accident.
18:14DCI did a forensic work on the car
18:19and was discovered that the car was still in gear
18:23and the headlights were still on when it went in.
18:25Number 4.
18:26The Lost City of Heliki
18:28Built in the early Bronze Age,
18:39the city of Heliki was a major hub in ancient Greek history.
18:42However, in 373 BCE,
18:44it vanished from the map.
18:46There were vague accounts that some kind of disaster had unfolded,
18:49but the specifics were never really confirmed.
18:52Centuries later,
18:53the Greek geographer Strabo claimed that Poseidon,
18:56the god of the sea,
18:57was directly angered by Heliki hoarding a statue of him.
19:00And so, he set off an earthquake,
19:02creating a tsunami that sank and destroyed everything.
19:05Naturally, this gave rise to speculation
19:07that Heliki could have been the real-life Atlantis.
19:09Plato wrote the story of Atlantis around 360 BCE,
19:14just after Heliki was destroyed.
19:17But for millennia,
19:18no one knew even where its remains were.
19:21Until, in the early 2000s,
19:23archaeologists found evidence of it submerged by an ancient lagoon.
19:27Atlantis or not,
19:28we do at least know where Heliki was.
19:30In Plato's tale,
19:32the citizens of Atlantis angered the gods
19:35who then sent an earthquake
19:36that made Atlantis sink into the sea.
19:40The Heliki legend offers up a direct parallel.
19:44Number 3.
19:45The Connecticut Vampire
19:46In the mid-1800s,
19:48the town of Griswold, Connecticut,
19:50was experiencing an epidemic.
19:52Whole families were falling ill
19:53and coughing up blood before dying.
19:55At the time,
19:56it was believed that a vampire curse was running rife.
19:59Fast forward to the 1990s,
20:01and a grave is discovered nearby
20:03with a skeleton laid to rest,
20:05unusually.
20:06Its arms are arranged in an X shape,
20:08and the severed skull is laid on its chest.
20:10This macabre burial relates to a superstition
20:13typically done by fearful people
20:14to stop vampires from coming back to life
20:16to feed on the living.
20:18And they had large fieldstone caps
20:20over the tops of these crypts.
20:22The fieldstone and the brick crypts,
20:24that really seems to argue
20:25some idea of keeping them down.
20:28At the time of the Griswold deaths then,
20:30the panic must have been extreme.
20:32But in 2019,
20:34the true nature of the events was realized.
20:36Following analysis of other skeletons in the area,
20:39it was discovered that the mysterious spate of deaths
20:41was really caused by tuberculosis,
20:43rather than vampirism.
20:45Number two,
20:46the Tunguska event.
20:48In 1908,
20:49a massive explosion took place
20:51near the Podkhamenea-Tunguska River
20:53in Siberia, Russia.
20:54In one hour,
20:55the explosion and the great fire that followed
20:57destroy a region of forest
20:59the size of Greater London.
21:01People who observed that thought
21:03the end of the world had come,
21:06judgment day,
21:06divine intervention.
21:07More than 800 square miles of forest
21:10was flattened by it,
21:11without any clear sign of a cause.
21:13The bang had been detected by seismic stations
21:15as far away as Washington, D.C.
21:18And,
21:18according to some witnesses,
21:20three people may have lost their lives.
21:22It's believed the force of the event
21:24was as much as 50 megatons,
21:26which is about as much as the Tsar Bomba,
21:28the most powerful weapon ever tested.
21:30At the time,
21:31and in the years immediately after,
21:33thousands of scientists
21:34tried to explain what happened.
21:35But it wasn't until 1930
21:37that a comet was first suggested.
21:39From there,
21:40further evidence mounted up.
21:42And now,
21:42it's firmly believed
21:43that the Tunguska event
21:44was an asteroid
21:45that had entered the Earth's atmosphere.
21:47In fact,
21:48we now know,
21:49since Tunguska,
21:50that we are
21:51potentially
21:52at the center
21:54of cosmic impacts,
21:56and they have happened in the past,
21:58and they might happen in the future.
22:00It generated a huge airburst,
22:02vaporizing itself,
22:03and the shockwave alone
22:04was what obliterated the forest.
22:06If it was a meteorite,
22:08and the Earth had turned a bit further,
22:10it would have destroyed St. Petersburg.
22:12An hour later,
22:13it would have destroyed Helsinki.
22:15One hour later,
22:16Stockholm,
22:16and after that,
22:17Oslo.
22:17Before we continue,
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22:33Number 1.
22:35The fate of Tsukumo No. 24
22:37In 1867,
22:39construction workers
22:40at a site in Kasaoka, Japan
22:41uncovered ancient human bones.
22:43At a location now known
22:45as the Tsukumo Shell Mound,
22:46archaeologists got to work.
22:48They discovered evidence
22:49of a settlement
22:50that dated back
22:50to the mid-Zhomon period,
22:52around 4,000 to 2,500 BCE.
22:55It was a grisly find, though,
22:57with some 170 skeletons
22:59contained in small graves.
23:01One in particular
23:02had a massive 790 wounds
23:04all over their bones
23:05and was missing a hand and leg.
23:08In 2021,
23:09researchers reconstructed
23:11what happened to this person
23:12and what caused his demise.
23:14We now know
23:14that his is the oldest
23:16known shark attack death
23:17in history.
23:18Fishing equipment
23:19and shell jewelry
23:20were also found nearby,
23:21as it emerged
23:22that Tsukumo No. 24
23:23had unfortunately
23:24lost a battle
23:25with a shark while hunting.
23:27What creepy mystery
23:28do you hope gets solved next?
23:29Let us know
23:30in the comments below.
23:31Let us know
23:34at the end of the video.
23:37If you happen to be in Firo Chic
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