The World’s Greatest Mysteries: Part 2

From Mentalfloss.com:

6 What happened to Roald Amundsen?

Exploration is a dangerous business. All 129 men who comprised the polar exploration venture known as the Franklin Expedition died in the years after the mission’s 1845 launch. The case of Amelia Earhart, the pilot who vanished with her navigator Fred Noonan while attempting to circumnavigate the globe in 1937, continues to make front page news despite little progress being made. We still don’t know what happened to British explorer Percy Fawcett, who vanished in the Amazonian jungle in 1925 while searching for the legendary lost city of Z, or Henry Hudson, who was placed in a small boat and cast adrift in waters off northeastern Canada following a mutiny in 1611.

The disappearance of legendary Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen is a little different. Amundsen had certainly been at the forefront of polar exploration—he was the first to sail the Northwest Passage and, a few years later, he beat England’s Robert Falcon Scott to the South Pole by several weeks. But Amundsen didn’t die while charting new territory; he vanished on a rescue mission while trying to come to the aid of Italian pilot and aeronautical engineer Umberto Nobile, whose airship had crashed while exploring the Arctic in 1928. Amundsen’s own plane is thought to have gone down somewhere around Bear Island in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. Fishermen found something strange in the area in 1933, but the object fell back into the sea before it could be recovered; a high-tech 2009 search came up empty. Amundsen’s fate remains a mystery, but according to Norway’s Roald Amundsen’s House, three objects that were recovered soon after Amundsen’s disappearance might suggest a crash south of Bear Island.

7 Who was D.B. Cooper?

No survey of historical mysteries would be complete without the tale of the man known as D.B. Cooper, the only person to have hijacked a commercial plane in the United States and gotten away with it (or at least evaded capture). Plenty of notorious criminals have managed to remain unidentified for decades or longer—we still don’t know the identities of Jack the Ripper, the Axeman of New Orleans, or the Zodiac Killer, to name a few—but Cooper belongs to a very different category. Other than showing a flight attendant a device he claimed was a bomb, his crime was nonviolent, and it was stunning in its boldness.

The day before Thanksgiving in 1971, Cooper boarded a flight from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle. A little after 3 p.m., he handed a flight attendant a note, flashed his supposed bomb, and made his demand: He was to be given $200,000 in cash and four parachutes, saying, “No funny stuff or I’ll do the job.” The plane landed in Seattle, traded its passengers and most of the flight attendants for Cooper’s ransom, and took off again.

As the plane flew over an area somewhere between Seattle and Reno, Cooper jumped into the cold, rainy night, buffeted by 200-mph winds, with nothing but the business suit (and possibly a trench coat) he was wearing, two parachutes, and $200,000 (a little more than $1.5 million in today’s currency). The ensuing manhunt, officially known as NORJAK, for “Northwest Hijacking,” lasted 45 years and yielded 800 suspects but no arrests. Cooper has become a folk hero to many, inspiring songs, movies, TV shows, podcasts, books, and even an annual gathering of enthusiasts known as “CooperCon.”

It’s likely Cooper didn’t survive the jump, which was so dangerous that an experienced parachutist would probably never have attempted it in the first place. In 1980, some of the ransom money was found near the Columbia River, leading some to suspect Cooper had perhaps parachuted into the water and died, but a 2020 study that examined diatom species on the recovered bills found they were exposed to water around May-June rather than November. Though the FBI officially dropped the case in 2016, amateur sleuths are still trying to crack the mystery. One theory even claims Cooper was a transgender woman named Barbara Dayton, who died in 2002 at the age of 76.

8 What happened to the lightkeepers of Flannan Isle?

There’s an entire category of historical mysteries devoted to vanishings—people who just seemed to disappear into thin air, leaving no physical clues about what might have happened to them. Jimmy Hoffa is probably the textbook example; nearly 50 years after he disappeared from the parking lot of a Detroit restaurant, his body still hasn’t been found. But 75 years before Hoffa met his fate, Scotland was investigating its own unexplained vanishing—three of them, in fact.

In December 1900, a steamship was passing by the Flannan Isles when its crew noticed the lighthouse had gone dark. Then, on December 26, a relief lighthouse keeper found the Flannan Isle structure abandoned. A search turned up no trace of the men, but there were signs that a violent storm had torn across the island: Supplies were strewn across the ground well above sea level, iron railings were twisted, and an enormous boulder had been dislodged. 

The subsequent investigation assumed the men had been caught in the storm and swept out to sea, but troubling details remained. For instance, if the men had ventured into the storm to secure equipment as had been assumed, why did one of them leave his raingear behind? A theory suggested by shepherds who grazed their sheep on the island connected the men’s deaths to a powerful marine spout that would sporadically shoot dangerous volumes of compressed seawater into the air. Perhaps one man stayed behind while the other two went out into a storm to secure equipment, saw from the lighthouse that conditions were right for the water to erupt, and rushed out to warn the others, only for all three to be swept out to sea in the storm. Others discount the compressed water explanation, but broadly agree that two of the men were outside doing something and for some reason the third man had to run outside in a hurry. A few years later, the poet Wilfrid Wilson Gibson invented stories of an overturned chair and partially eaten food, helping to create an enduring mystery.

9 Was King Arthur real?

The story of King Arthur is one of the most influential and widely studied literary cycles in Western culture, but there’s one big thing we don’t know about it: Did Arthur really exist?

There’s a vague reference to a legendary hero named Arthur in the Welsh poem Y Gododdin dated to around the 6th or 7th century, but it’s not that simple. The story survives in a couple different versions written centuries later, and only one of them mentions Arthur. Whether the Arthur reference is a 7th century original, a 13th century addition, or something in between is a contested area of scholarship.

The first explicit accounts date back to the 9th century Historia Brittonum, which documented 12 battles supposedly fought against the Saxons by a British military commander identified as Arthur. His feats were impressive, to say the least—in the 12th battle, he supposedly killed over 900 enemy soldiers all by himself.

Cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth built on Arthur’s legend in the 12th century with his History of the Kings of Britain, and subsequent Arthurian poems and romances added now-familiar elements such as the Round Table and the quest for the Holy Grail. It wasn’t until the 15th century that Thomas Malory came along and gave us what many now think of as the definitive story of King Arthur, Le Morte d’Arthur. 

When we ask whether Arthur really existed, it’s important to decide which version of him we’re asking about. If it’s the one that began with Geoffrey—a glorious king who once ruled most of Europe—the answer is probably no. If such a ruler had existed, odds are slim he would have been omitted from the historical record. But the Historia Brittonum’s earlier account of a great military leader called Arthur might have some basis in fact. The author probably got some of the details wrong—it would have been logistically impossible for one man to have fought in all 12 of the battles—but it’s not impossible that at some point in the dim and distant past there was a real military leader who rallied the fractured tribes of early medieval Britain against their Saxon invaders.

10 What happened to the Roanoke colony?

( Pat’s Note: I do a deeper dive into this particular mystery later in the month.)

England’s plan to colonize North America did not get off to a smooth start. By the time artist-turned-explorer John White and about 115 colonists arrived on Roanoke Island off the coast of modern-day North Carolina in 1587, the settlement already had a reputation. It had been abandoned once in 1586, and a garrison of 15 men who were later deposited there, tasked with holding the land on England’s behalf, also disappeared, leaving behind nothing but a single skeleton to greet the next batch of colonists, who weren’t even supposed to be staying there. (The plan had been to proceed up to the Chesapeake Bay after stopping at Roanoke Island, but the conventional story is that the captain refused to go further.) There’s no reason to have expected White’s colony—which settled in an area where their recent predecessors had had trouble securing food, encountered formidable weather, and were quickly burning through any good will the Native American populations had shown them—would have fared any better.

The colonists arrived too late in the year to grow their own food, and White returned to England for more supplies. The first Anglo-Spanish War delayed his return, and when he finally got back in 1590, everyone was gone. But White didn’t seem puzzled by their disappearance. Someone had carved the word CROATOAN, the name of both a nearby island and the friendly Native American group who inhabited it, into a palisade post (or maybe a tree). White had instructed that if the colonists found themselves in distress, they should carve a type of cross alongside the location, but there was no cross—so he interpreted as a “certaine token of their safe being at Croatoan.” But a storm stopped him from sailing there to look for them, and he was never able to raise the money to finance another expedition to the New World. 

Hard archeological evidence for White’s proclamation “of their safe being at Croatoan” is still lacking. Most researchers think the settlers were either killed by Native Americans who’d turned hostile to European colonizers or, more likely, were absorbed into friendlier Native populations.  

According to archeologist Charles Ewen, the idea that there’s anything particularly strange about the colony’s disappearance might be a relatively modern development. “It’s no big mystery until you start to get a historical type of writing in the 1800s,” he told The New York Times in 2020, pointing out that failed colonization attempts were hardly out of the ordinary (though Ewen himself is skeptical of the Croatoan explanation for a lack of actual evidence). Science writer Andrew Lawler, author of The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke, told Salon that “the ‘Lost Colony’ is a product of the 19th century”—a time, he says, when “the idea of the colonists assimilating with the Native Americans was a taboo.”

SOURCE: MENTAL FLOSS