The Unexplained: 40 More Unsolved Mysteries That Will Baffle You – Part 3

John Brisker was an American basketball player who played in the ABA and NBA in the early 1970s. Brisker averaged over 20 points per game and was considered a solid defensive player too. Due to his volatile personality and penchant for fighting he was cut at the end of the 1975 season. In 1978 John Brisker, flew to Uganda to allegedly start an import/export business but was never heard from again. The prevailing theory is that he went there as a guest of Ugandan strongman Idi Amin. When Amin was overthrown in 1979, Brisker was allegedly executed by a firing squad.

British Library has at least three books/manuscripts that are written entirely in cipher. “The Subtlety of Witches,” authored by Ben Ezra Aseph, from 1657, “Order of the Altar, Ancient Mysteries to Which Females Were Alone Admissible: Being Part the First of the Secrets Preserved in the Association of Maiden Unity and Attachment,” from 1835 and “Mysteries of Vesta,” from 1850.

In 2018, during a New York Times interview with Glitterex, the interviewer asked Manager Lauren Dyer a simple question. She was asked if she could tell which industry served as Glitterex’s biggest market and her answer was instant: “No, I absolutely know that I can’t.” She knew which industry it was and said “you would never guess it.” She even added that if you looked at it you would never guess its glitter. She even declined to give an answer off record. Speculations on internet forums range from glitter being used by the U.S. Department of Defense, its use in stealth tech, to it being used in space applications, but the mystery remains which industry is the largest buyer of glitter in the USA.

Out of over 2000+ nuclear test detonations that have taken place on earth, only one has an unknown nationality. On September 22, 1979, the Vela satellite reported the characteristic double flash (a very fast and very bright flash, then a longer and less-bright one) of an atmospheric nuclear explosion of two to three kilotons, in the Indian Ocean between Bouvet Island (Norwegian dependency) and the Prince Edward Islands (South African dependencies). US Airforce planes flew into the area shortly but could find no signs of a detonation or radiation.

Over 2000 large Medieval-era man-made tunnels, known as “Erdstall”, have been discovered all across Europe, with the largest number being discovered in Germany and Austria. Nobody knows who made them or why. The tunnels are incredibly narrow (around 24 inches in width) and short (3’3” to 4’7” feet in height). A number of tunnels include a “slip” which is a point where the tunnel becomes even more narrow as it goes to a deeper level. Some of these tunnels are quite complex, with multiple layers like that of a modern subway system with different chambers and numerous offshoot tunnels. Some of them are adjacent to cemeteries, while others can be found in the middle of the woods. Most of these tunnels have absolutely nothing inside them. There is no evidence of tire tracks or human remains or waste from day to day life. Millstones and a plowshare have been found, but they are very uncommon. Charcoal has been found in a few tunnels, which has been dated to 950 to late 1100s. The diggers have left no recorded trace of why they made these.

Mary Celeste was an American brig with a crew of eight and two passengers, the master's wife and infant daughter, which embarked on her fatal voyage, from New York to Genoa, in the autumn of 1872. The master, Benjamin Briggs, was highly experienced and highly respected, a man of good character and strong religious beliefs. The ship was found adrift in the Atlantic Ocean a few days later, totally deserted, but in totally seaworthy conditions and with the crew’s belongings perfectly intact. The crew was never seen or heard from again.

English sweating sickness was a disease of unknown cause that appeared in England as an epidemic on five occasions - in 1485, 1508, 1517, 1528, and 1551. It was confined to England, except in 1528–29, when it spread to the European continent. The disease was very contagious. It caused profuse sweating and those that caught it often died within hours. After raging for more than 60 years, the last major outbreak of the disease in England was recorded in 1551. The disease claimed the lives of tens of thousands before mysteriously vanishing. Just as quickly as it came, it left the continent, and the exact cause behind it still remains unidentified by epidemiologists today.

In 1968, a fishing boat from the Canary Islands named Fausto was on its way back to port after picking up a father who was trying to visit his sick kid. They never arrived. A British ship ran into them 4 days later and hundreds of miles away from the islands. Its crew looked dehydrated but only asked for gas to get back home. British crew insisted on helping them back home, but they refused and said everything was fine. The crew’s families heard of this and expected to see them see soon but Fausto never arrived. Two months later, out in the middle of the Atlantic, an Italian boat found the Fausto drifting at sea. They found no one on board and the boat’s condition was fine, but they made a startling discovery - a naked, partially mummified corpse. Next to the body was a journal. Several of its pages were ripped out and but the last page read “Don't tell anyone what happened on this boat, God forgive us.” The Italian boat attempted to tow Fausto to South America but in the middle of the night, it started to sink and they had to cut the line.

In 1953, the United States Air Force pilot Felix Moncla was stationed at Kinross Air Force Base in Michigan when a mysterious airborne object appeared on ground radar. Lt. Moncla scrambled his F-89 Scorpion interceptor to investigate the anomaly, but as he grew nearer, the ground radar reported seeing his aircraft suddenly merge with the object. Both objects immediately vanished from radar vision. Theories centered on a collision with an unreported Canadian aircraft, but Canadian authorities denied any such aircraft being in the area. No confirmed debris or wreckage was discovered and it still remains a mystery what happened to Felix Moncla.

From about 1867-1871, there were reports of a strange noise reverberating through iron-hulled ships outside of Grey Town in Nicaragua. The noise did not affect wood-hulled ships, only those made of iron, and consisted of a loud, long, high-pitched, steady vibration. It was “musical” in its likeness, and its source could not be determined. One captain said that the sound had a distinct ¾ time signature like a waltz that turned his ship’s hull into a “great musical sounding board.” The source of the vibrations is still undetermined to this day, and no mention of anything similar around Grey Town has been reported since 1871.