15 Shocking Unsolved Mysteries That Still Need Answers in 2020 – Part 2

About 13 paintings were stolen from an art museum in Boston in 1990 by two thieves dressed in police uniforms, who tricked museum security into letting them access the gallery. Value of the paintings lost was over $500 million, making it the largest private property heist in history. The case still remains unsolved.

2. Scientists have recently discovered repeating radio signals coming from a mysterious source well beyond the Milky Way. While one-off fast radio bursts (FRBs) have been detected in the past, this is the first time multiple signals have been detected coming from the same place in space. They were theorized to be exploding stars but a recent observation of a sequence of these pulses from the same location essentially rules that out. One particular interesting FRB has been named FRB 121102. It is too bright to be radio-wave burps of evaporating supermassive black holes at galactic centers, and they are far too frequent to be easily explained as the echoes from energetic mergers of neutron star pairs. Similarly, gamma-ray bursts occur only about once a day, not often enough to be obviously associated with FRBs. The sources are thought to be a few hundred kilometers or less in size, as the bursts last for only a few milliseconds, and if the bursts come from cosmological distances, their sources must be very energetic, generating as much energy in a millisecond burst as the Sun does in 80 years. Some have speculated that these signals might be artificial in origin, that they may be signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.

3. In 1957, Pan Am 944, a luxury airliner mysteriously crashed in the Pacific while carrying multiple people with motive, means, and opportunity to cause the disaster. The mystery behind its crash has remained unsolved for over 60 years.

4. In 1979, two Mississippi men arrived at a sheriff's office claiming to have been abducted by aliens with lobster-claw hands. The local sheriff left them alone and secretly recorded them, expecting a hoax to be revealed. The sheriff was instead shocked when the two slowly continued to talk in “terribly distressed” voices about the abduction.

5. Michael Rockefeller, the son of then New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, was collecting indigenous art in New Guinea in 1961 when he suddenly vanished. The official reason given for his death was drowning. Despite his father’s formidable resources Rockefellers never found any trace of him. Years later, Carl Hoffman, a reporter for National Geographic, traveled to New Guinea to investigate and heard a gruesome story. Michael had inadvertently stepped into the middle of a war between Dutch colonists and the Asmat tribe, and the Asmats scalped him, ate his brains, cooked his skin, and used his bones for tools. Then they covered themselves in his blood. The legend remains unconfirmed, but it continues to be passed down through the generations.

In 1983, a young man by the name of Don Decker claimed that he could make it rain anywhere he wished, at any time. Decker was an inmate at the Monroe County jail in New York when his grandfather passed away. He was granted leave to go to the funeral and spend a few days with family, and that’s when the strange events began occurring. The night of the funeral, Decker was staying with family friends when he was seized by a deep chill and he slipped into some kind of trance. While in the trance, water started dripping from the ceiling and walls, but there were no pipes in the area and no conceivable reason for the leaks. As soon as Don left the home, the house went back to normal. The same thing occurred in a pizzeria Don visited, leading the owner to think that he was possessed by the devil. When he returned to prison, the walls and ceiling of his cell started leaking, leading officers to conclude that Don was making it rain. Thanks to assistance from a priest, the rain stopped and never occurred again, but the cause of the incidents remains a mystery to this day.

7. On the morning of August 5th 1962, Marilyn Monroe was found dead by apparent suicide in her Brentwood home. Although the case looked clean cut, there are people out there who believe that Monroe was murdered by the Kennedy family, who didn’t like her relationship with the president John F. Kennedy and were worried about how much she knew. Depending on what accounts you read, some sources state that Monroe was visited by a man and Rob Kennedy the day of her death, and witnesses of the visit were threatened into silence. Some also say that when the paramedics were called, Monroe was alive and received treatment. The possibility of foul play here is harrowing – and regardless of the truth, a sad end to the life of the troubled blonde bombshell. Apparently, there also exists a 15 minute video of Marilyn Monroe engaging in oral sex with a man that J. Edgar Hoover was convinced was President John Kennedy.

8. In 1942, residents of Pascagoula, Mississippi lived in fear of the “phantom barber”: a criminal who would sneak into homes at night only to steal locks of hair from his victims. Though an arrest was made, many believe it to be a setup, and the identity of the phantom barber remains a mystery.

9. Hours before his death Edgar Allen Poe was found on the streets of Baltimore. He was incoherent, wearing another man's clothes, and unable to explain how he got there. The cause of his death is an unsolved mystery. Many people think that he was a victim of cooping, a form of voter fraud. This is when someone is paid to abduct and drug a civilian then force them to go to the polls and vote for their captors' employer. This wasn't an uncommon thing to happen back then and explains most of his situation when found close to death on the streets.

10. Yale University holds the mysterious 'Voynich Manuscript', which originated from medieval Europe. It is a 600 year old 200 page book which is dotted with illustrations ranging from zodiac, herbs, astrology to naked women. It is written in a language which is still completely unknown today and it has left cryptographers and linguists stumped for over a century since its discovery. What makes it mysterious rather is the fact that it is too systematic to be “random gibberish.” Voynich Manuscript obeys the law of Zipf, making it very plausible that it's either derived from a real language or is an incredibly advanced hoax. Zipf’s Law is the linguistic phenomenon which states that in every language, the most frequent word used occurs twice as much as the second most frequent word which occurs three times as much as the third, etc.

A Merchant ship known as the Mary Celeste was discovered adrift and deserted in the Atlantic in 1872. The last log entry was 10 days before her discovery. When another ship happened upon her, all of the provisions and belongings of the crew were perfectly intact, but the whole crew was missing. Even her cargo of denatured alcohol was intact. Investigating officers considered various possibilities of foul play, including mutiny by Mary Celeste's crew, piracy, and conspiracy to carry out insurance or salvage fraud. No convincing evidence supported these theories, but unresolved suspicions led to a relatively low salvage award.

12. In 2003 a former American Airlines Boeing 727 was stolen from an airport in Angola. Two men had mysteriously boarded the plane and disappeared without a trace. The plane and its occupants have never been found, despite an extensive FBI/CIA investigation.

13. In 2014, astronomers discovered that 18 giant blue stars were being ejected out of our galaxy and they were unsure how the stars were being propelled. Unlike most other known hypervelocity stars, these are not exiting after interacting with the black hole in the heart of the galaxy. Leaving the galaxy takes a phenomenal amount of energy. Stars must reach speeds 1 million mph (1.6 million km/h) faster than the 600,000 mph (970,000 km/h) at which objects already speed around the Milky Way.

14. The Guadalupe Mountains, located in West Texas and Southeastern New Mexico, are said to be home to some of the richest gold mines in the world. Ben Sublett, an old miner who lived during the 19th century, was supposed to have found a vein of gold so valuable he could mine $10,000 worth of gold in a week. Sublett was the first "town character." He left town frequently on prospecting trips. The railroad workers and good women of the town saw that his family didn't go hungry. He didn't provide for them much better when he was there. He frequented the saloons and did odd jobs; “witching” for water, collecting bones and day work on the railroad to make a grub stake to go back to the mountains. Then, one day he came into the saloon and tossed a bag of gold nuggets on the bar and bought drinks for the house. He also promised his family the moon. He made several more trips of 3 or 4 days duration and brought back nuggets each time. People tried to bribe him with both whiskey and cash to disclose the location of his treasure, but he wouldn't tell. He didn't even tell his own son. He died in January, 1892, leaving less than $50 in gold nuggets under his pillow in a buckskin sack. To this day, no one knows where the mine is located, and scientists don’t believe large gold veins are even located in the Guadalupe Mountains.

15. In 1763, a paralyzed man named Owen Parfitt mysteriously disappeared without any trace. In Shepton Mallet, England, Parfitt sat outside his sister’s home, as was often his habit on warm evenings. Virtually unable to move, the 60-year-old man sat quietly is his nightshirt upon his folded greatcoat. Across the road was a farm where workers were finishing their workday. At about 7 p.m., Parfitt’s sister, Susannah, went outside with a neighbor to help Parfitt move back into the house, as a storm was approaching. But he was gone. Only his folded greatcoat upon which he sat remained. Investigations of this mysterious disappearance were carried out as late as 1933, but no trace or clues to Parfitt’s fate were ever uncovered.