Prepare to have your curiosity satisfied! Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're unraveling the most spine-chilling historical enigmas that have finally been cracked. From ancient curses to mysterious disappearances, these solved mysteries will leave you amazed!
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00:00In one hour, the explosion and the great fire that followed destroy a region of forest the size of Greater London.
00:07People who observed that thought the end of the world had come, judgment day, divine intervention.
00:13Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're counting down our picks for the most disturbing and unsettling historical mysteries that have at least finally been solved.
00:22Plato wrote the story of Atlantis around 360 BCE, just after Heliki was destroyed.
00:30Number 10. The Wiltshire Crop Circles
00:33It's baffled scientists, it's baffled experts, it's even baffled the newspapers.
00:38As far back as the 1600s, strange crop circles are said to have baffled farmers, usually appearing with no entry point into the field itself.
00:47It can seem like whatever causes them must have come in from above, and the leading theory has long been aliens.
00:53Beginning in the 1970s, a particular series of crop circles was discovered in Wiltshire, England, igniting a decades-long fever of curiosity and panic about extraterrestrials.
01:03However, in 1991, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley admitted that they were responsible for more than 200 incidents in the area.
01:11With reporters watching on, they showed how they made the patterns using a plank of wood, some rope, and a baseball cap with wire.
01:35Number 9. Crystal Skulls
01:37According to crystal skulls enthusiasts, as many as 12 of the 13 authentic skulls have been discovered, and are in private collections.
01:47But where did these so-called authentic skulls come from?
01:51For years, multiple international museums have contained an unusual crystal skull.
01:56The origins of these seeming relics was long unknown, although some believed they dated to pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.
02:03According to one legend, were you to combine 13 skulls in particular, it would serve to stop the infamous Mayan doomsday event that came and went on December 21st, 2012.
02:13There are many who believe that this so-called reunion of the skulls will awaken sacred knowledge of the gods, knowledge that has been hidden from mankind for thousands of years.
02:25Alongside all the myth and intrigue, however, there's also been doubt.
02:29And in 2008, amidst the hype for the related Indiana Jones movie released at the time, a number of leading institutions conducted research,
02:37including the Musée de Quai Branly in France, the Smithsonian in the US, and the British Museum in the UK.
02:43They discovered that the skulls likely aren't ancient at all, and are more likely to have been made in the 20th century, perhaps even post-World War II, and in Europe.
02:53There was simply no doubt in our mind that the Mitchell-Hedges skull is the creation of a modern stone carver using diamond tools, very small drills, and cutting wheels.
03:09Number 8. Tutankhamen's Death
03:12There's this incredible irony that we learn so much about ancient Egypt through Tutankhamen, but we really know so little about him.
03:22When the tomb of Tutankhamen was discovered in 1922 in the Valley of the Kings, it marked a monumental day for Egyptologists.
03:29Yet what actually led King Tut to his tomb as a teenager was a mystery. How did the iconic pharaoh die?
03:36There were several theories, including that he may have fallen off a chariot or that he was murdered, but nothing with hard evidence.
03:43All we know is that King Tut was alive, and at the age of 19, he was being mummified.
03:50In 2005, however, Tutankhamen's mummified remains were CT scanned, and it was found that on top of several hereditary issues, he had suffered a compound fracture to his leg shortly before passing.
04:02Genetic testing found that he was also infected with malaria. As such, researchers now believe that he was killed by a combination of disease and the severity of the open and major wound to his leg.
04:13So we can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that Tut wasn't murdered by a blow to the back of the head?
04:20Sure, 100%. The CT solved the mystery. He was not murdered by a blow to the head.
04:28California's Death Valley, known for both extreme heat and cold, is the land of many mysteries. One of them seems to be solved at last.
04:36Since the early 1900s, there's been confusion over some seemingly wandering rocks, most famously along the racetrack playa in California's Death Valley National Park.
04:46Large stones have been shown to move and leave large track marks, without evidence of interference by humans or animals.
04:53Some as heavy as 700 pounds that move across the desert floor and leave long trails behind them.
05:00They apparently just travel when they want to.
05:02So are and were they perhaps possessed by ghosts? We now know that that is not the case.
05:08Between December 2013 and January 2014, several of these stones were fitted with GPS, and time-lapse photography was used to track them.
05:17They were again found to move great distances, but it was discovered that they were actually propelled by thin ice sheets that continually form and break beneath them.
05:25It is a bizarre process, but it is enough to push the rocks and solve the mystery.
05:30When ice breakup takes place, when the ice begins to melt just enough under the light breezes,
05:35that ice, big ice sheets drive the rocks in front of them and just plow them along the bottom of this shallow pond.
05:46His identity has eluded police.
05:48But now, a potential breakthrough. A local researcher claims he's solved the puzzle and can finally put a name to the face.
05:55In 1948, the body of a man was found on Somerton Park Beach in Australia.
06:00Lacking identification and dressed in American attire, he was found to have been in otherwise good health before his passing.
06:06A greater strangeness to the case started to settle in though, when a scrap of paper was found in his pocket, torn from a work by the medieval poet Omar Khayyam.
06:15Investigations led the police to the book from which the scrap was taken, inside which a coded message was discovered.
06:21It all meshed together to spark a long-running speculation that the unknown man may have been a spy.
06:27In 2022, after analysis of a hair sample, we at last got more details.
06:32Using some of the Somerton man's hairs given to the research team in 2011, they unlocked DNA.
06:38And by comparing that with millions of samples given by users of family tree databases, they built a 4,000 person family tree.
06:46It was revealed that he was really Carl Charles Webb, an electrical engineer from Melbourne, born in 1905.
06:54It's fantastic to see this man, an unknown man on a beach, now has a name, he now has a family, he now has a place.
07:07It was a mystery that followed the city of Vermilion for decades.
07:11In 1971, teenagers Cheryl Miller and Pamela Jackson were on their way to an end of school party in South Dakota.
07:17However, they never arrived, and for decades, it was unknown what had happened to them.
07:22They didn't pack, they didn't cash their paychecks, they didn't call home, none of it makes any sense.
07:28Speculation that something criminal had occurred and that we may never learn the truth was a common theory.
07:33However, in 2013, a severe drought lowered the water level enough in a nearby creek so that the underside of a car could clearly be seen buried in the mud.
07:42They got the license plate number off it, and they realized it was the Studebaker that was missing.
07:50Shockingly, inside the vehicle were human remains.
07:53The following year, DNA analysis concluded that the bodies were those of Miller and Jackson.
07:58The investigation also mentioned that there was no evidence of foul play, likely indicating that it was a tragic accident.
08:04DCI did a forensic work on the car and was discovered that the car was still in gear and the headlights were still on when it went in.
08:16The Lost City of Heliki
08:18On one terrible night, two and a half thousand years ago, the entire Greek city of Heliki and all of its people were swept beneath the sea.
08:26Built in the early Bronze Age, the city of Heliki was a major hub in ancient Greek history.
08:31However, in 373 BCE, it vanished from the map.
08:35There were vague accounts that some kind of disaster had unfolded, but the specifics were never really confirmed.
08:42Centuries later, the Greek geographer Strabo claimed that Poseidon, the god of the sea, was directly angered by Heliki hoarding a statue of him.
08:49And so, he set off an earthquake, creating a tsunami that sank and destroyed everything.
08:54Naturally, this gave rise to speculation that Heliki could have been the real-life Atlantis.
08:59Plato wrote the story of Atlantis around 360 BCE, just after Heliki was destroyed.
09:06But for millennia, no one knew even where its remains were.
09:10Until, in the early 2000s, archaeologists found evidence of it submerged by an ancient lagoon.
09:16Atlantis or not, we do at least know where Heliki was.
09:20In Plato's tale, the citizens of Atlantis angered the gods who then sent an earthquake that made Atlantis sink into the sea.
09:29The Heliki legend offers up a direct parallel.
09:36In the mid-1800s, the town of Griswold, Connecticut was experiencing an epidemic.
09:41Whole families were falling ill and coughing up blood before dying.
09:44At the time, it was believed that a vampire curse was running rife.
09:49Fast forward to the 1990s, and a grave is discovered nearby with a skeleton laid to rest, unusually.
09:55Its arms are arranged in an X-shape, and the severed skull is laid on its chest.
10:00This macabre burial relates to a superstition typically done by fearful people to stop vampires from coming back to life to feed on the living.
10:07And they had large field stone caps over the tops of these crypts.
10:11The field stone and the brick crypts, that really seems to argue some idea of keeping them down.
10:17At the time of the Griswold deaths then, the panic must have been extreme.
10:21But, in 2019, the true nature of the events was realized.
10:25Following analysis of other skeletons in the area, it was discovered that the mysterious spate of deaths was really caused by tuberculosis, rather than vampirism.
10:37In 1908, a massive explosion took place near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Siberia, Russia.
10:57More than 800 square miles of forest was flattened by it, without any clear sign of a cause.
11:02The bang had been detected by seismic stations as far away as Washington, D.C.
11:07And, according to some witnesses, three people may have lost their lives.
11:11It's believed the force of the event was as much as 50 megatons, which is about as much as the Tsar Bomba, the most powerful weapon ever tested.
11:19At the time, and in the years immediately after, thousands of scientists tried to explain what happened.
11:25But it wasn't until 1930 that a comet was first suggested.
11:29From there, further evidence mounted up.
11:31And now, it's firmly believed that the Tunguska event was an asteroid that had entered the Earth's atmosphere.
11:50It generated a huge airburst, vaporizing itself.
11:53And the shockwave alone was what obliterated the forest.
11:59It would have destroyed St. Petersburg.
12:02An hour later, it would have destroyed Helsinki.
12:04One hour later, Stockholm, and after that, Oslo.
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12:22Number 1. The Fate of Tsukumo No. 24
12:26In 1867, construction workers at a site in Kasaoka, Japan, uncovered ancient human bones.
12:32At a location now known as the Tsukumo Shell Mound, archaeologists got to work.
12:37They discovered evidence of a settlement that dated back to the mid-Jomon period, around 4,000 to 2,500 BCE.
12:44It was a grisly find, though, with some 170 skeletons contained in small graves.
12:50One in particular had a massive 790 wounds all over their bones and was missing a hand and leg.
12:57In 2021, researchers reconstructed what happened to this person and what caused his demise.
13:03We now know that his is the oldest known shark attack death in history.
13:07Fishing equipment and shell jewelry were also found nearby,
13:11as it emerged that Tsukumo No. 24 had unfortunately lost a battle with a shark while hunting.
13:16Which of these mysteries are you only just hearing about for the first time?
13:19And which remaining unsolved problems do you think we may never get answers for?
13:23Let us know in the comments.
13:25The lost colony remains this mystery that's at the very heart of the origin of our nation.
13:30People remain fascinated by Roanoke because we know so little about the place.
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