10 Real Life X-File Type Mysteries

A few people noticed a dark-haired woman when she was dropped off at the swanky Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. On the morning of 15 January 1947, a woman was walking with her young daughter along a barely developed street in the planned neighborhood of Leimert Park saw what she thought were two halves of a tailor’s mannequin. It wasn’t. Short had been cut in two pieces, neatly at the waist, and drained of blood.

She had been mutilated, her intestines removed, and her mouth slashed from ear to ear, a gruesome cut known as a Glasgow Smile. Her body had then been washed clean before being dumped in an empty field. More than 50 suspects were interviewed, both male and female – some of whom confessed to the crime. But the murder was never solved, only adding to the crime’s mystique.

In 1947, the Los Angeles Examiner contacted Phoebe Short to inform her that her daughter, Elizabeth, had won a beauty contest. Only after prying all the personal information out of her did they tell her that her daughter, the Black Dahlia, had been murdered and mutilated.

In July 1518, an incident known as the Dancing Plague of 1518 struck residents of Strasbourg. Around 400 people were afflicted with dancing mania and danced constantly for weeks, most of them eventually dying from heart attack, stroke or exhaustion.

Between the 14th and 17th century, Europe was prone to incidents of “Dancing Mania” where up to thousands of people danced erratically for days, weeks, or months. Many collapsed from exhaustion; some died.

Studying Cold War Submarine history is always full of mysteries. Like what did the USS Parche do that made it the most decorated submarine in the history of the Navy? It got 9 Presidential Unit Citations. Also, what did the USS Narwhal do and why was its construction so different from other subs?

One of the theories is that many of their operations’ were to recover soviet missile fragments, from soviet nuclear tests. The U.S. wanted to see if the radiation from the soviet missiles had a signature that could be traced, so the U.S. could develop an early warning system. Supposedly this system was developed, with every successful mission given a presidential citation.

The “Monster with 21 Faces” was the alias of an individual or group responsible for blackmailing and poisoning the products of candy/confectionery companies in Japan, 1984. The Monster poisoned several confectionery items across Japan, belonging to different companies.

Letters were sent taunting the police and warning “Moms of the nation” about the dangers of buying the sweet companies’ products. After continuous harassment, one Police Superintendent even killed himself. Later, the Monster sent a final message to the media stating that they had stopped lacing products with cyanide. They were never heard from again, and nobody was ever convicted.

The Hessdalen Light is an unexplained light usually seen in the Hessdalen valley in the municipality of Holtålen in Sør-Trøndelag county, Norway.

Unusual lights have been reported here since the 1940s or earlier. Sighting of Hessdalen lights increased from December 1981 until the summer of 1984 when lights were observed 15 to 20 times per week. Since then, the activity has decreased and the lights are now observed 10 – 20 times per year. They are a bright, white or yellow light of unknown origin, standing or floating above the ground level. Sometimes the light can be seen for more than one hour.

Ramirez was brought into an emergency room in 1994 suffering from late-stage cervical cancer. Suffering from tachycardia, the staff tried to defibrillate her heart; at that point, several people saw an oily sheen covering Ramirez’s body, and some noticed a fruity, garlic-like odor that they thought was coming from her mouth. When a nurse attempted to draw blood from Ramirez’s arm, she noticed an ammonia-like smell coming from the tube. Lab technician noted floating particles in her blood.

She was later dubbed “the toxic lady” by the media when many staff members who worked on her became ill. Overall, 23 people became ill and 5 were hospitalized. A skeleton crew stayed behind to stabilize Ramirez. At 8:50 pm, after 45 minutes of CPR and defibrillation, Ramirez was pronounced dead from kidney failure related to her cancer.

One of the theories is that she had been using dimethyl sulfoxide, a solvent used as a powerful degreaser, as a home remedy for pain. According to this theory, dimethyl sulfoxide crystallized when it left her body. They believe that the defibrillation caused it to turn into a toxic gas which is why the people that worked with her got sick.

On August 7, 1994, during a rainstorm, blobs of a translucent gelatinous substance, half the size of grains of rice each, fell at the farm home of Sunny Barclift in Oakville, Washington. Handling them made people sick and killed some animals. Lab test showed blobs to contain human white blood cells.

Several theories cropped up at the time to explain the appearance of the blobs, though none have been proven correct.

UFO encounters occurring at US military facilities is an interesting one to examine. In some cases during UFO sightings, American conventional and nuclear missile systems mysteriously malfunctioned and shut down, with no credible reasoning.

There is in fact quite a bit of official documentation and eyewitness reports from credible military officials and contractors to back up many of these close UFO encounters took place at or around various secure military facilities and missile systems over the years.

Here is an example highlighting one bit of testimony of an incident that occurred at Maelstrom USAF base (Montana) in 1967, in which 10 Minuteman nuclear missiles apparently mysteriously went offline when a UFO was reported by multiple individuals around the facility. Here is a brief video describing some of the testimony of this incident, and again, there were multiple eyewitnesses involved who have gone on the record about this UFO encounter.

The 1980 “Rendlesham_Forest_incident” is another well-publicized and very interesting case which took place in England at the twin NATO air base facilities of RAF Woodbridge and RAF Bentwaters and has plenty of official documentation to support that something very bizarre happened that night.

During a nuclear missile test (using a dummy warhead aboard) that was flown out of Vandenburg AFB in California in 1964, there was another close encounter incident where a UFO was apparently caught on film. In this case, known as the “Big Sur Incident”, the UFO was apparently seen on film rendezvousing with the missile in flight, orbiting it while the missile was traveling some 8000 miles per hour downrange towards Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific, with the UFO shooting what was described as “beams of light” at the missile, resulting in the destruction of the booster and dummy warhead payload.

Insatiable Tarrare (1772 – 1798) was a French showman and soldier who was noted for his unusual eating habits. He was said to have an incredibly large mouth with stained teeth and supposedly had a visible vapor rising off of his body. Able to eat vast amounts of meat, he was constantly hungry. His parents could not provide for him, and he was turned out of the family home as a teenager. He moved to Paris where he worked as a street performer.

He ate any and everything, including live animals, stones, silverware, anything he could get his hands on. At the start of the War of the First Coalition, Tarrare joined the French Revolutionary Army. With military rations unable to satisfy his large appetite, he would eat any available food from gutters and garbage, but his condition still deteriorated through hunger. The French military even tried employing him as a courier to smuggle documents by eating them. On his first mission, he was captured by Prussian forces, severely beaten and underwent a mock execution before being returned to French lines.

No doctor was able to find a cause or a cure to his appetite. He was eventually kicked out of the military hospital where they were studying him, after being suspected of eating a toddler (14 months old). He was ejected from the hospital since they caught him trying to eat dead bodies in the morgue on several occasions. He reappeared four years later in Versailles suffering from severe tuberculosis, and died shortly afterward, following a lengthy bout of exudative diarrhea.

David Swenson of 3M Corporation described an anomaly where workers encountered a strange “invisible wall” in the area under a fast-moving sheet of electrically charged polypropylene film in a factory. This “invisible wall” was strong enough to prevent humans from passing through. A person near this “wall” was unable to turn, and so had to walk backward to retreat from it.

This occurred in late summer in South Carolina, August 1980, in extremely high humidity. Polypropylene (PP) film on 50K ft. rolls 20ft wide were being slitten and transferred to multiple smaller spools. The film was taken off the main roll at high speed, flowed upwards 20ft to overhead rollers, passed horizontally 20ft and then downwards to the slitting device, where it was spooled onto shorter rolls. The whole operation formed a cubical shaped tent, with two walls and a ceiling approximately 20ft square. The spools ran at 1000ft/min, or about 10MPH. The PP film had been manufactured with a dissimilar surface structure on opposing faces. Contact electrification can occur even in similar materials if the surface textures or micro-structures are significantly different. The generation of a large imbalance of electrical surface charge during unspooling was therefore not unexpected and is a common problem in this industry.

On entering the factory floor and far from the equipment, Mr. Swenson’s 200KV/ft handheld electrometer was found to slam to full scale. When he attempted to walk through the corridor formed by the moving film, he was stopped about half way through by an “invisible wall.” He could lean all his weight forward but was unable to pass. He observed a fly get pulled into the charged, moving plastic, and speculates that the e-fields might have been strong enough to suck in birds.