The bizarre disappearance of the entire population of Virginia's Roanoke colony in 1588 is one
of America's most legendary unsolved mysteries.
But it's not the only time large groups of people have seemingly vanished from the face
of the Earth.
Here's a look at some of history's weirdest unexplained mass disappearances.
Aztalan Indians
Just outside the small town of Lake Mills in south central Wisconsin lie the remains
of an ancient Native American city.
Named Aztalan by the settlers who discovered the ruins in 1836, the city contained stepped
pyramids, conical mounds, evidence of housing, fishing, and farming, and even a substantial
defensive stockade wall containing up to 30 watchtowers.
At its peak, Aztalan could have housed upwards of 500 people.
But what happened to those people is a mystery.
Sometime after 1300 AD, the site was abandoned, and despite decades of research, nobody knows
why.
Was it because of drought?
Or war?
So far, the fate of the citizens of Aztalan remains unknown.
Roman 9th Legion
In the year 108 AD, an inscription in the northern city of York, England, mentions the
presence of the Roman Ninth Legion, a military unit of around 5,000 soldiers stationed to
protect the city from the wild inhabitants of Scotland.
By the year 122, though, they were gone, replaced by the new Sixth Legion - and no record exists
explaining what happened to the Ninth Legion.
What is known is that around the time of the Ninth Legion's disappearance, the Roman Emperor
Hadrian traveled all the way to northern England to personally oversee the construction of
a gigantic wall across the whole island of Britain to keep northern invaders and raiders
at bay.
Many have theorized that the wall was built in response to the destruction of the Ninth
Legion.
But while Hadrian's Wall still stands today, no sign has ever been found of the final fate
of the missing Ninth Legion.
The population of Great Zimbabwe
The name "Zimbabwe" is an anglicized version of aa Shoan dialect word that means "stone
houses" and it comes from the name of a mysterious city: Great Zimbabwe."
A massive, technologically advanced city, Great Zimbabwe was a center of trade that
was home to roughly 18,000 people at its peak.
Which makes it even more bizarre that nobody knows what happened to any of those people,
who seemingly all vanished mysteriously about 400 years ago.
In fact, it's such a mystery that nobody today knows for sure who even built the city or
who lived there.
All we know for sure is that once, there was a thriving city, and now there are just mysterious
ruins.
Moche Civilization
According to archeological discoveries, the
Moche civilization thrived between the years 1 and 800 AD.
Experts at metal working and irrigation, the Moche also had a thing for human sacrifice
- and for disappearing completely off the face of the Earth.
So what happened to the estimated 25,000 people who belonged to the Moche civilization?
Theories abound, from drought to civil war.
But the only ones who know for sure at the Moche themselves - wherever they went.
5th Battalion Norfolk Regiment
Many legends have sprung up around the fate of the 5th Battalion of the Norfolk Regiment,
a British military unit which joined the Gallipoli campaign in Turkey on August 10, 1915 and
seemingly vanished without a trace just two days later.
According to a dispatch from the battlefield, "They charged into the forest and were lost
to sight or sound.
Not one of them ever came back."
That's weird enough, but 50 years later at a reunion of survivors of the battle, three
soldiers from New Zealand claimed to have witnessed a British battalion get swallowed
up by a cloud, which then disappeared up into the sky.
Those reports have led to decades of speculation that the battalion may have been abducted
by aliens.
Historians believe there's a much more likely answer, of course, claiming the unit was simply
killed by machine gun fire behind enemy lines, where their bodies were unable to be identified
until after the war in 1919.
Still, the firsthand accounts of the battalion's mysterious disappearance have fueled a debate
that still rages today.
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