What do you think about this?
On the morning of December 1, 1948, a well dressed man was found dead, propped against a seawall on Somerton Beach in Adelaide, Australia. No wallet. No identification. The labels had been cut out of his clothes. He carried nothing that could name him.
In a hidden fob pocket, police found a tiny scrap of paper torn from a book of Persian poetry, printed with two words, Tamam Shud, meaning it is finished, or ended. The exact book it came from surfaced later with a strange handwritten code in the back that has never been cracked. For more than seventy years he was simply the unknown man, buried under a blank headstone, the subject of endless spy theories. Only recently did researchers, using DNA drawn from hair preserved in a plaster cast, put a likely name to him, a Melbourne electrical engineer called Carl Webb. Police have never formally confirmed it. Yet how he died, and why he was stripped of every clue, is still a mystery.
What if the answer to who erased this man’s identity is still sitting inside that uncracked code?
A cold war spy, a jilted lover, or something we will never fully know? What do you think happened to the Somerton man?
What do you think about this? In 1891, a poor French priest named Bérenger Saunière began tearing up his church floor, then spent the next two decades funding lavish buildings on a stipend that should not have covered it. Real treasure, or a secret about how he ran his church?
What do you think about this? The Georgia Guidestones were commissioned anonymously in 1979 by a man calling himself R.C. Christian, and no one ever learned his real name before the monument was bombed on July 6, 2022. Message, or a monument that did not deserve to stand?
What do you think about this? Pacifica’s Devil’s Slide has swallowed sections of Highway 1 since 1937, and a WWII watch bunker still perched on its cliff edge has sat abandoned there since 1949. Geology, or a stretch of coast that keeps trying to shrug people off?
What do you think about this? On November 24, 1971, a hijacker calling himself Dan Cooper parachuted from a Boeing 727 with 200,000 dollars and vanished. In 1980, a boy found 5,800 dollars of that exact cash along the Columbia River. Survived, or never told a soul?
What do you think about this? On September 12, 2023, researcher Jaime Maussan presented two small, elongated bodies to Mexico’s Congress, calling them non-human. Scientists who studied similar specimens found them manufactured. Hoax, or evidence a government put on the record?
What do you think about this? At age two, James Leininger began describing a WWII plane crash in detail, and researchers later matched his account to pilot James Huston Jr, killed near Iwo Jima in 1945. Coincidence, or memory that should not exist?
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