Historic Mystery

On December 9, 1965, a fireball crossed the sky and Kecksburg residents said something came down in the woods. An Air Force memo says searchers found nothing, and a NASA records lawsuit decades later turned up nothing on the case.

In 1945 SS men rowed heavy crates out onto Lake Toplitz and sank them. Divers later raised millions in forged British pounds made by Jewish prisoners. But did the SS also sink gold or secret files that are still down there?

For decades Martin Bormann was reported alive in South America. A skeleton found in Berlin in 1972 and a DNA test in 1998 tell a different story, though a few skeptics kept asking about red clay on the skull.

In 1903 a doctor, a bank cashier and other respected residents of Van Meter, Iowa, said they fired on a winged monster with a glowing horn. Days later, some of their neighbors called it pure fabrication. But did the town really face a monster, or did one local writer make the whole thing up?

In April 1943 the B-24 Lady Be Good flew home from a raid on Naples and never landed. In 1958 she turned up almost intact deep in the Libyan desert. But did she fall victim to bad luck, or to a navigation error nobody on the ground thought to question?

In 1935, RAF officer Victor Goddard said he flew over a derelict Scottish airfield and saw it as it would look in 1939. Airfield records and later research suggest a more ordinary explanation.

From Buddhist iddhi and flying saints to séances and UAP reports, author Christopher Noël asks whether consciousness, not technology, holds the key to levitation.

Between April 1928 and March 1929, arsenic killed Edmund Duff, Vera Sidney and Violet Sidney of one Croydon family. Two inquest juries found murder, a third could not decide, and in August 1929 the authorities said no one would be charged.

On October 21, 1978, a 20-year-old pilot told Melbourne air traffic control that a long, lit craft was hovering above him over Bass Strait. Then the radio filled with noise. But did Valentich really see something the official inquiry could not explain?

On October 31, 1974, eight-year-old Timothy O’Bryan died after eating a cyanide-laced Pixy Stix in Texas. The poisoner was his father. Joel Best’s decades of case counts have never confirmed a stranger poisoning a trick-or-treater.

On an August afternoon in 1901, two Oxford academics went looking for the Petit Trianon and came back convinced they had seen Marie Antoinette. Were they walking in 1789, or did memory do the rest?

Political assassinations have been a persistent issue throughout history, affecting leaders from Julius Caesar to modern times.

“But where is everybody?” This simple question, blurted out by physicist Enrico Fermi while walking…

European medieval architecture tended towards the ornamented. For centuries an enormous amount of the productivity…

The vast and impossibly ancient necropolis in Saqqara in the Egyptian desert is filled with…