Every mystery has an answer.
It may be that it’s no longer possible to get hold of the answer, or that modern technology
just needs to catch up with unravelling the history.
It may just take the right person being in the right place at the right time, but even
the most famous of mysteries can be solved.
Number 5
For centuries, the Bosham head baffled researchers.
At first glance it looked like a strangely shaped giant boulder.
But on closer inspection, the unusual shape is clearly deliberate, and the faintest traces
of a human face can be seen.
Who the head was supposed to depict was a mystery for more than 200 years until finally
modern technology was able to solve the famous mystery.
The Bosham head was discovered at the turn of the 19th century in a flowerbed of the
vicarage in the small village of Bosham near Chichester, England.
It weighed 375 pounds and was twice the size of a human head.
It had been heavily damaged by the elements, but was still clearly the remains of a once
great statue.
Despite archaeology just beginning to rise in popularity at the time, there was little
interest in the head.
It was moved to the garden of the Bishop of Chichester, where it was damaged even more
by the elements.
Eventually, historians realized this was an artifact that needed to be protected and studied,
so it was moved to the local museum, where it was cemented to the floor and promptly
forgotten about.
At this point, researchers had little hope of ever identifying who the head had once
belonged to.
Even dating the statue seemed impossible, as methods like carbon dating only work on
organic material.
The only way to really date stone statues is by how they’re made, and centuries of
erosion had made interpreting that impossible.
The head was eventually moved to another museum and put in storage.
Now not on display, researchers could properly study the artifact and got to work at attempting
to solve the famous mystery.
In 2013, Miles Russell and Harry Manley from Bournemouth University took on the project.
Using a 3D laser scanner, the head was reconstructed in digital form.
From there, a computer was able to aid in interpretation.
Details that had survived the centuries could be highlighted, making the overall image clearer.
From there, the researchers were able to trace similarities between the remains of the facial
features and the distinctive hairline to that of the Roman emperor Trajan, who had ruled
the empire between 98 and 117 CE.
The Roman conquest of Britain had been completed about 50 years before Trajan came into power,
and his reign was relatively peaceful in this part of the empire.
The statue was believed to have been commissioned by his successor, the more famous Hadrian,
and was thought to have towered over Chichester Harbour.
The mystery over who was depicted in the Bosham head is finally answered, but now researchers
are curious as to what happened to the rest of the statue, and whether any of it still
remains.
Number 4 The story of the KAL 007 flight from the US
to South Korea was once one with more missing pieces than known information.
The overall conclusion to the sad story of the flight was well known.
Both Russia and the US had confirmed the passenger plane had been taken down by Soviet Union
fighter jets.
All 269 people aboard the plane had perished.
But how this had happened remained a mystery for seral years.
It was 1983 and Cold War tensions were still high.
The Cubin Missile crisis may have been decades ago, but now the US president was calling
the Soviet Union an evil empire and there were talks of a space weapon being planned.
The US had spy planes near Soviet airspace, including Boeing RC-135s, aircrafts that looked
very similar to the 707 planes typically used by civilian airlines.
It was a 707 with the designation KAL 007 that left JFK Airport on August 31st.
The flight was run by Korean Airlines, and was due to arrive in Seoul at around 6am local
time the following morning.
Aboard the plane were passengers from 16 different countries, mostly from South Korea and the
US.
Among the 62 US passengers was Representative Larry McDonald, a staunch anti-Soviet politician.
The flight stopped in Alaska briefly to refuel then set off across the Pacific.
It would never make it to South Korea.
About three hours before the plane was due to land, ground control in Tokyo got a startling
message “Rapid decompression… descending to one zero thousand”.
It sounded like the pilot was speaking through an oxygen mask.
The plane wouldn’t respond to messages.
The plane plunged into the Sea of Japan.
At first, Moscow attempted to deny its actions, but later confirmed it had instructed its
men to take out the plane.
It claimed the US had been using the plane for espionage.
The plane had been in Soviet airspace, and the pilot had not responded to signals sent
by Soviet jets.
The US ramped up its anti-USSR campaigns.
Moscow could prove the plane was in Soviet airspace, but it was a mystery as to how or
why it had ended up there.
Many claimed they knew more than they were letting on, and the fact they would not cooperate
with search efforts led some to believe they had taken the passengers prisoner.
Other conspiracy theories, such as one that suggested the US had deliberately sent the
plane to test the Soviet’s radar technology, also spread.
It wasn’t until the fall of the USSR and the end of the Cold War that the truth emerged.
The plane had not deliberately flown off course, like theorists and Russia suggested.
It had been an autopilot mistake.
There were two kinds of autopilot available for the plane.
One was the incredibly accurate inertial navigation system.
The other was one which determined the course of the plane by a magnetic compass, which
can vary at high altitudes.
It’s now believed the pilots thought they were using the accurate autopilot, but instead
had switched to the magnetic navigation system by mistake, which took them into Soviet airspace
without anybody aboard realizing.
Number 3
There are many ancient monarchs whose remains have disappeared over the years.
The most famous of these is likely Cleopatra and Mark Anthony, as well as the even more
ancient Alexander the Great, whose grave could unlock the secrets of his death.
But by medieval times, records of the remains of important people were being kept, so it
was strange that the remains of one of Britain’s most infamous monarchs were lost for centuries.
King Richard the third was king of England and Lord of Ireland for just three years,
between 1483 and 1485.
His rise to power was controversial.
He was the brother of the former king and the crown should have passed to his nephew,
but young Edward was declared illegitimate and Richard took the crown instead.
The controversy didn’t end, and a dispute with another branch of the family tree led
to the War of the Roses.
Richard and Henry Tudor went to battle near a small Leicestershire town, and Richard lost
his life in the fight, becoming the last British monarch to die in battle.
While Henry Tudor was crowned king, what happened to the remains of his predecessor was lost
to history.
As the last king before the rise of a new dynasty, Richard III was cast as the villain
in the most famous pieces of literature about him, which were written to celebrate the Tudors.
As such, there wasn’t a big movement to locate the remains of the monarch.
By the time there was any significant interest in finding where he had been buried, the reformation
and redevelopment of the area meant solving the infamous mystery wouldn’t be easy.
Many suspected the remains had been thrown into a river, or reburied in an unmarked grave
when the local monasteries were torn down.
Even the exact locations of these old monasteries were uncertain.
Eventually, campaigners convinced the local government and university to help fund a survey
by ground penetrating radar.
They were able to map out the location of what had once been the Gray Friars Priory.
In 2012, excavation of the area began, and archaeologists soon came across a grave.
Tiles found nearby indicated the grave was barely below ground level when it had been
dug.
It was uneven, and looked like it had been dug in a hurry.
The remains that had been placed there didn’t quite fit in the hole that had been dug, the
head tilted upwards as it pressed against the soil.
The grave was close to touching a robber’s trench, indicating it had almost been disturbed
when the monasteries foundation stones had been removed.
It was also just a few inches below the foundations of an old outhouse which had been built on
the site centuries later.
Despite the lack of even a shroud to cover the remains, researchers were optimistic this
was the person they were looking for.
The curved spine in particular as well as battle scars matched with what would have
been expected.
Comparing mitochondrial DNA with DNA from the decedents of Richard’s sister eventually
confirmed this was the lost grave of the king and the mystery had been solved.
Number 2
It’s a popular saying that we know more about space than we do about what lurks inside
our oceans.
That might be an exaggeration, but we do have more detailed maps of the surface of Mars
than we do for the seafloor.
Given some of the creatures we have discovered to be lying at depths too far for the sun
to penetrate, it’s understandable why looking too deeply might not be high on many people’s
to do list.
There are all sorts of things that have come up from the ocean, or that have been encountered
when humans have travelled deep underwater, that most people would find terrifying.
So, a mysterious noise loud enough to be heard across the Pacific Ocean originating near
the point where horror writer HP Lovecraft pegged as the home of a world ending god quickly
captured imaginations when it was picked up by equipment owned by the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration.
The noise, which has been nicknamed The Bloop, was recorded in 1997 and was heard by underwater
microphones positioned more than 5000km apart.
According to NOAA, it was unlike anything that had ever been heard before.
It sounded organic, but the bloop was much louder and much deeper than anything any known
animal could produce.
An animal would have to be much bigger than a blue whale in order to produce the sound.
The mystery meant imaginations ran wild, with theories of some unknown sea creature hiding
in the most remote parts of the Pacific Ocean.
It was only recently that the Giant Squid was recorded alive for the first time, and
150 years after its existence was first confirmed by marks left on whales.
So, it didn’t seem impossible that some mysterious creature was responsible for the
noise.
There were a few problems with this theory.
It didn’t seem possible for something that big to have gone unnoticed for so long, and
why was this the only evidence it existed?
Scientists had a different theory: ice quakes.
Further research recorded more, similar noises to the Bloop.
Each one they could prove was caused by giant sheets of ice breaking away from Antarctica.
The discovery finally solved the famous mystery.
If there is anything bigger than a blue whale hiding in the ocean, it’s yet to make itself
known to us at the surface.
Number 1
It was a series of flukes which solved the mystery of what happened to a 70-year-old
grandmother who was missing for almost 30 years.
Griffin Lake in British Columbia is an idyllic location with a beautiful view of the mountains
and forest.
The trans-Canada highway runs beside the north and east edge of the lake, which a series
of cabins sit on its north bank.
In 2019, a family came to visit the lake, staying at the cabins.
They had heard about a news stories from 10 years earlier.
A van had driven into the lake in June 2009 with a family of four inside.
The family were rescued by two teenagers, who received a bravery award.
The guests were curious as to whether the van itself was still in the lake.
The cabin owner’s teenage son took the guests onto the lake and they found an upturned vehicle
not far from the road.
They assumed it was the van from the 2009 incident so didn’t report it.
A few days later, they were discussing it at a picnic and were overheard by an off-duty
police officer.
The officer knew the van had in fact been recovered and the second vehicle needed to
be investigated.
The teenage son went back out to the vehicle with a GoPro to help identify the car.
The license plate showed it belonged to a woman who had been missing since 1992.
Janet Farris had been enroute to her niece’s wedding when she vanished in October that
year.
She was last seen on October 2nd.
She had stayed at her sister’s house and stopped to buy gas at Salmon Arm, about an
hour’s drive from the lake.
When she didn’t show up at the wedding, Janet’s family and the local police force
searched the area.
Ditches along the side of the highway were searched by foot and helicopters were brought
in for an aerial view.
It was thought she must have driven into one of the deeper lakes in the area, but there
were no signs of any issues on the road.
There was a fear something darker may have happened, but with both the car and Janet
missing the truth remained a mystery.
When the rescue workers pulled the car out of the lake in 019, remains were found inside.
They were later confirmed to be that of Janet.
It brought the mystery to a sad conclusion, but Janet’s family were happy to finally
have answers.