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Things Nobody Knows—And Nobody Ever Will

Cochise

Priest of the cult of the Dog with the Broken Paw
Joined
Jun 17, 2011
Messages
8,468
I could say 'Who is Jack the Ripper' - or even 'Was there a Jack the Ripper'

But how about 'What did Agatha Christie do in her 11 missing days'.

Your suggestions please (either for solutions or other unsolvable mysteries).

PS - please try to come up with things that have evidence that they actually existed as a conundrum. Another one that has always intrigued me is the J. Hartigan saga. Or the murder of Evelyn Foster. But I don't mean us to be confined to crime stories, I just want to be entertained!
 
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Poor Agatha lost her memory fighting a giant alien wasp - at least, that's what Doctor Who would like us to believe.

And what happened to Amelia Earheart?
 
Here's a mystery that I found in the Observer decades ago. Long story short, the poet WB Yeats died abroad and his body was brought back to Ireland a few years later. Or rather his bones, which I originally read were described in a particular way which suggested they were of another, named individual.

(It seems the decomposed body/bones retrieved from the French also included a surgical corset, which a man who was buried nearby always wore and was known to have been buried in. Some men wore them, it wasn't unusual, but Yeats didn't.)

There has been speculation ever since about whether it's really old WB in there or some poor Frenchman who'd suffered from back trouble. However, the family don't like it and have now stated that they firmly believe it's him.

The Observer article was long - two broadsheet pages, with photos - and included eyewitness reports from people who'd seen the remains. A major scoop, only 60 years late!

The gist was that the original grave had been intended to be temporary as Yeats knew he was dying and had asked his wife to have his body returned to Sligo for a proper burial.

However, this was 1939 and the war started. By the time it was attempted, the story goes, the grave, being poorly marked, was hard to find and the wrong body was recovered. (One suspects that after a lot of hard digging in a spot that might or might not be right, the workers, quite understandably, were taking whatever coffin they found there!)

I wish I'd kept it. Should have, as I read it about 50 times. Fascinating. Maybe it was an extract from a book? I'll have to track it down.
 
Don't they dig'er up every 10 years or so on a different island each time? Or bits of her anyway, or bits of someone.

Exactly. There are parallels to the Catholic custom of collecting pieces of the "true cross" (which must have required the wood from at least three major deciduous forests) or the osseous relics of curiously polydactylous saints.

Soon, every island in the Pacific, every aviation museum and every Fortean aficionado will own a reliquary containing a mortal remain from the legendary aviatrix.
 
Exactly. There are parallels to the Catholic custom of collecting pieces of the "true cross" (which must have required the wood from at least three major deciduous forests) or the osseous relics of curiously polydactylous saints.

Soon, every island in the Pacific, every aviation museum and every Fortean aficionado will own a reliquary containing a mortal remain from the legendary aviatrix.

*nods* Yup, I own a toe, as does each member of the Atletico Madrid first team.
 
Thinking about this, I guess there are various questions to be answered about most mysteries. We have to know something happened or we wouldn't know there was a mystery.

An event has ocurred - we need to know how, who or what caused it, and why.

There is no doubt really that poor Amelia went down somewhere in the Pacific, and that it was because of faulty navigation. But we don't know exactly what went wrong or exactly where, or if she or Fred survived the crash.

So I'd give that maybe a four out of ten in the 'We'll never know' ranking. Someone could turn up a genuine artefact, maybe already has. As with the Ripper, even if one of the investigators has hit on the right solution then they'll have great difficulty getting the other camps to believe it. So lets add an asterisk to account for post-event obfuscation by poor investigation.

Therefore, on the same basis, with JtR we don't know who, we can only hazard a guess why, and we do know how. Say 7/10* because of the confusion generated by the investigators both ancient and modern.

J Hartigan - we know a murder took place. We have virtually no clue by whom, or why. So I'd rate that as 8/10, no asterisk.

The first Brighton trunk murder - we don't even know who was murdered. 9/10.

Anyone suggest a 10/10? I'd suggest Oak Island as a 10/10* except we have no certainty there ever was a pit.
 
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Thinking about this, I guess there are various questions to be answered about most mysteries. We have to know something happened or we wouldn't know there was a mystery.

An event has ocurred - we need to know how, who or what caused it, and why. ...

The mysteries that end up haunting me the most aren't the ones that may involve truly paranormal phenomena, but rather the ones that almost certainly don't. By this I mean those mysterious outcomes that probably resulted from a random stimulus or unexpectedly bizarre chain of events that made people (almost always in a group) take actions that resulted in catastrophic outcomes. These are the cases where the outcome was, or should have been, a foreseeable risk under whose wheels the people threw themselves anyway.

The two most well-known examples would be whatever chains of events led to:

- the deaths of seasoned backcountry skiers at Dyatlov Pass, and
- the abandonment of the Mary Celeste while the ship was quite seaworthy.

Side Note: I find the Earhart disappearance far less mysterious, because she was frankly operating out of her depth in attempting a rendezvous requiring communication / coordination via technical means she wasn't accustomed to using, hadn't bothered to learn to an effective level of competence, and couldn't work around when they failed her. I'm curious as to exactly how Amelia met her end, but I'm not mystified that she managed to go missing.
 
the abandonment of the Mary Celeste while the ship was quite seaworthy.

That's been explained in terms of the crew escaping a chemical leak by sitting it out in a lifeboat and being accidentally disconnected from the ship. Seems right to me.

Other mysteries are only strange to people not in on the story, such as in unsolved murders. The disappearance of Madeleine McCann is one such. Somebody knows what happened, just not us! As time passes people die and their secret is gone with them.
 
That's been explained in terms of the crew escaping a chemical leak by sitting it out in a lifeboat and being accidentally disconnected from the ship. Seems right to me. ...

Yes ... I'd given a lot of credence to the alcohol fumes theory since it surfaced, but now I've backed off because the evidence and testimony at the time don't really support it (at least not as the sole motivation for leaving the ship).
 
Yes ... I'd given a lot of credence to the alcohol fumes theory since it surfaced, but now I've backed off because the evidence and testimony at the time don't really support it (at least not as the sole motivation for leaving the ship).

Really? Another theory up the Swanee, then? :D
 
My 10/10 cases would probably be ancient indecipherable scripts.

These would include the Vinca script, Minoan/Cretan hieroglyphs and Rongorongo.

There is virtually no chance of discovering a Rosetta Stone for these scripts and it appears likely that they will remain indecipherable for ever.
 
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In the 1890s Robert Grant Haliburton said he found evidence of lost pygmy tribes in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, in areas he'd never visited because they were considered too dangerous for Europeans. His descriptions of the "dwarfs" and their lives are very detailed and vivid. There were letters in newspapers and magazines from other people backing up his statements. But after he died no one ever followed up on his findings. Maybe it was a hoax or people seeing what they thought fitted the Turanian theory about folk memories of small prehistoric humans becoming little people in folklore.

FYI: Thread established for this topic, with link to one of Haliburton's publications on the subject.
https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...co-haliburton-mount-atlas.65191/#post-1811559
 
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Is our universe finite and, if so, what's outside it? (along with many other cosmological questions)
If it's finite is doesn't necessarily have an outside. Think moebius strip. which only has one side, but with a lot more dimensions.

Things no-ones ever going to know? The location of Atlantis, the whereabouts of the Holy Grail, and who the other guman was (gunmen were?).
 
Is our universe finite and, if so, what's outside it? (along with many other cosmological questions)
Yes, it does seem to be finite. A multiverse is outside (according to various theories - this can never be verified).
Beyond that, who knows?
 
In the 1890s Robert Grant Haliburton said he found evidence of lost pygmy tribes in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, in areas he'd never visited because they were considered too dangerous for Europeans. His descriptions of the "dwarfs" and their lives are very detailed and vivid. There were letters in newspapers and magazines from other people backing up his statements. But after he died no one ever followed up on his findings. Maybe it was a hoax or people seeing what they thought fitted the Turanian theory about folk memories of small prehistoric humans becoming little people in folklore.

The Patagonian Giants is another mystery of that kind. One reference - there are several readily available:

rephaim23.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/patagonian-giants-the-ona-tribe-dr-frederick-cooks-photos-and-notes-7-foot-giants/

EDIT: The previous link no longer works. Included here is a link from the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/2019050...ederick-cooks-photos-and-notes-7-foot-giants/
 
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We will never know what happened to Schnor (former moderator here)
Disappeared from here overnight--website went with him a few days later.

No trace.
Why did Christian Nash, a personal friend of mine who I talked into joining this board drive his car into a tree on the way back from Rendlesham forest one night on a completely straight road in good weather conditions causing his death .. he never bought booze from the shop I was working in, didn't use drugs and didn't seem depressed .. Jenny Randles has told me to leave that question alone .. his brother got in touch with me online once who I'd/I've never met .. (was it his brother ?) Christian often tried to talk me into going to Rendlesham with him, I was only once a passenger in his car and he felt we were being followed by someone, the car was black, yes, so I told him to pull into a layby and lock the doors with the engine still running .. I'm following Jenny's advice.

http://forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?members/christian-nash.52430/
 
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AlienHub. They crashed and were adrift here for a few orbits and then they vanished.... never to be heard from again.
 
I guess its going that way. I'm not sure what i intended when I kicked it off, other then certain mysteries (I was thinking of earthly ones, supernatural or otherwise, not the cosmos) get discussions that just go round and round in circles and after a time it seems difficult for people to accept we just aren't going to know. Bar a time machine or something.
 
Why did Christian Nash, a personal friend of mine who I talked into joining this board drive his car into a tree on the way back from Rendlesham forest one night on a completely straight road in good weather conditions causing his death .. he never bought booze from the shop I was working in, didn't use drugs and didn't seem depressed
Sorry to hear about your friend, Swifty, how tragic but also very strange. :oldm:There is an odd 'feeling' around Rendlesham at times, dunno more than that though.

I've heard of cases of single-car crashes similar to that (not related to Rendlesham) that are but of course I don't know the details of what happened to your friend so I won't go into that further.



..Jenny Randles has told me to leave that question alone ..

Hope you don't mind me asking though, especially considering the gravity of your post, but... you've met Jenny Randles? Author of my all-time favourite and most treasured book Time Storms?
 
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