The Black Dahlia Murder
On the morning of 15 January 1947, a young mother named Betty Bersinger walked her child along South Norton Avenue in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles and saw what she first took for a discarded department-store mannequin lying in a weeded vacant lot. It was the body of Elizabeth Short, a 22-year-old waitress […]
The Great Pyramid’s Construction Theory
How Was the Great Pyramid of Giza Actually Built? The Great Pyramid of Giza was built in roughly 23 years for the Fourth Dynasty pharaoh Khufu, beginning around 2580 BCE and finished by his death around 2560 BCE. It contains an estimated 2.3 million dressed limestone and granite blocks averaging about 2.5 tonnes apiece, drawn […]
The Man in the Iron Mask
A masked prisoner died inside the Bastille on the night of 19 November 1703, and the parish register of Saint Paul recorded his burial under the name Marchioly. He had been moved through four French fortresses across thirty four years, always in the personal custody of the same jailer, and the velvet that covered his […]
The Georgia Guidestones Mystery
What the Georgia Guidestones Were The Georgia Guidestones were a granite monument that stood in a cow pasture seven miles north of Elberton, Georgia, from March 1980 until July 2022. Six granite slabs, nearly twenty feet tall and weighing about 119 tons in all. Four upright tablets carried ten guides for what the commissioner called […]
The Dyatlov Pass Incident
On the night of February 1-2, 1959, nine experienced Soviet hikers cut open the inside of their tent on the eastern slope of a mountain the Mansi people called Kholat Syakhl, “Dead Mountain,” and walked downhill in subzero temperatures, most of them barefoot or in socks. None of them came back. The investigation that opened […]
The Curse of the Pharaohs
What the Curse of the Pharaohs Actually Was The Curse of the Pharaohs is a folkloric tradition rather than an ancient Egyptian one. It names the cluster of stories, headlines, and warnings that gathered around the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb in November 1922 and the death of Lord Carnarvon in April 1923. The curse is […]
The Hollow Earth Theory
The Hollow Earth Theory is a clearly falsified hypothesis that nevertheless built one of the most durable storylines in modern Western thought. Modern seismology and satellite gravimetry have closed the geophysical question: the Earth is a stratified solid with a thin crust, a silicate mantle that transmits shear waves, a liquid iron-nickel outer core, and […]
The Paul Is Dead Beatles Theory
What Is the Paul Is Dead Beatles Theory? The Paul is Dead Beatles theory is a 1969 American folk legend claiming that Paul McCartney secretly died in 1966 and was replaced by a look-alike, with the surviving Beatles encoding clues in their albums. The story traveled from college newspapers to radio to Life magazine in […]
Jack the Ripper’s Identity
Why Jack the Ripper’s Identity Is Still Open Jack the Ripper is the unidentified killer of at least five women in Whitechapel, East London, between 31 August and 9 November 1888. Police never charged anyone. The principal suspects, including Aaron Kosminski, Montague Druitt, and Francis Tumblety, were named in internal Metropolitan Police documents that surfaced […]
Area 51 and Alien Technology
A dry lakebed in southern Nevada has carried more legend per square mile than almost any patch of American ground. Locals knew it as Groom Lake. Workers nicknamed it the Ranch. The CIA wrote it into memos as Area 51. For decades the United States government would not concede the place existed at all, and […]