History's Unsolved Mysteries

When no word was received of nine students trekking Russia’s remote Ural Mountains in February 1959, alarm bells rang. A search party was sent into the snowy abyss to rescue them, but instead of grateful faces, the team stumbled across something much more bizarre and gruesome. Five bodies were found within a kilometre of their camp, undressed, burnt, and injured. Over the next few months, the corpses of the remaining four were found missing tongues, eyeballs or – most mysteriously of all – physically unharmed, but with catastrophic internal injuries. For decades the case of the Dyatlov Pass incident became the fodder of conspiracy theories, and even the official conclusion in 2020 by the Russian government of death by hypothermia in the wake of an avalanche failed to satisfy many.…

Mysterious deaths have always grabbed our attention. Even where there might be a logical reason behind a death, we want to believe that we are being lied to, or that there is another reason behind it. Such is human nature; unless we have evidence for something, we are naturally inclined to doubt what we are told, or even what we see. Over the centuries, there have been many mysterious deaths, and attendant conspiracy theories. Here are just a few of the cases that have made us stop and think, and that continue to capture public attention. “THEY WERE NOW EXPOSED TO THE ELEMENTS IN THE DEPTHS OF WINTER” THE DYATLOV PASS MYSTERY They throughwere innocently hiking through the youngMountains – but nine young Russians came back They were nine experienced…

The young couple taking an evening walk along Somerton Beach didn’t think much of the man they saw lying on the sand with his head propped against the old seawall. He appeared drowsy, for he lethargically raised his right arm before dropping it into his lap limply. They assumed he was just catching the last of the sun’s rays, and so they left him to relax as they made their way up the 25 wooden steps leading to the corner of The Esplanade and Bickford Terrace, in the shadow of the Crippled Children’s Home. It was 7pm on 30 November 1948, and they were to be the last people to see the mysterious Somerton Man while he was still alive. 30 minutes later, another pair of walkers strolling along the…

To the outside world, the Dupont de Ligonnès seemed the very epitome of an upper-middle class French family, with a loving, religious wife and a charming, supportive husband who doted on their four beautiful children. Sadly, the tableau was nothing more than a paper-thin façade that masked a very different life and as the investigators moved in, the notion of this happy family began to unravel. Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès came from an aristocratic family and, on the death of his father, Bernard-Hubert Dupont de Ligonnès, on the 20 January 2011, Xavier inherited the title of Count. He was a handsome, charismatic and intelligent man, but, although he gained a degree from the École Nationale Supérieure de Mécanique et d’Aérotechnique in engineering, his success as an entrepreneur and businessman had…

When Wayne Williams was charged and convicted of murdering two young adults, it also ended a two-year investigation into the killing of at least 28 African-American children, the assumption being that he had murdered them all. But as time went by, people began to doubt the conviction and take Williams’ protestations of innocence a little more seriously. The killer first struck in the summer of 1979 when the bodies of two 14-year-old boys were discovered in a remote wooded area of Atlanta. Edward Smith had vanished on the 21 July and had been shot in the back. Alfred Evans went missing four days later only to be found strangled and abandoned on nearby wasteland. Ten days later, a third victim went missing, but this time the body of Milton Harvey…

It was a freezing cold evening on 24 February 1978 when five close friends, Jackie Huett, Ted Weiher, Jack Madruga, William Sterling and Gary Dale Mathias, decided to take a mini road trip, 75 kilometres from their home town of Yuba City to Chico in order to catch a basketball game. Although it was cold out, the young men didn’t feel the need for jackets, as they intended to drive up in Jack Madruga’s beloved 1969 Mercury Montego and would be coming straight home after the game finished at around 10pm. It was important that they returned home as quickly as possible when they were done because the group were playing a game themselves the following day. It was a big event for their team, the ‘Gateway Gators’, and they…