The Unsolved Mysteries Iceberg Part 1

Hello my loyal blog readers! I’ve got something different for you today.

As I’ve alluded to multiple times, although the Urge To Blog burns ever bright in my heart, I have been having a lot of trouble ingesting the delicious media–books, games, movies–that fuel that flame due to my migraines. What I’ve been searching for is a source of Infinite Content, something that I can bang away about without having to do much—or any—research. Just sit down when I’m feeling up to it, hammer out some content, then take a nap.

Recently, I‘ve been watching iceberg explainer videos on Youtube, and I came across this extensive unsolved mysteries iceberg chart which includes a lot of topics I‘m already familiar with. In case you‘re not familiar with the concept, an iceberg chart lists topics revolving around a specific theme in order of obscurity, with the top layers (the parts of the iceberg that are above the surface) being more mainstream or generally well known, while the deeper layers list obscure theories or trivia. Some icebergs also order their subjects by how disturbing they are, with the Not Safe For Life topics going at the bottom.

For this blog post series, I‘m going to discuss some of the topics on the Unsolved Mysteries Iceberg and give my take on them. I‘m not going to tackle all of them, because there‘s some I don‘t have any familiarity with and the whole point of this exercise is that I won‘t have to do any research, but I‘ll hit as many as I can.

Given that this involves unsolved murders and serial killers, it gets into some heavy territory. As such, entries that are likely to be disturbing or upsetting will be titled in red. There are none of these in the first post.

Let me know in the comments if you find this stuff interesting.

LEVEL 1: ABOVE THE SURFACE

Oumuamua’s Origin

Oumuamua is an object that zipped through the solar system in October of 2017. It was the first confirmed interstellar object ever detected, meaning that it originated from somewhere outside of our solar system (Omuamua means something like “scout” in Hawaiian). This would be interesting enough on its own, but several properties of the object got UFO fans very excited.

First was Oumuamua’s shape, as it appeared to be long and cylindrical, unlike the spheroids or rocky clumps that usually characterize asteroids. Secondly, according to the telescope data it accelerated as it curved around the sun, in a way that didn’t seem to fit with the known behaviour of comets and asteroids. These observations lead some people–including some respected astronomers–to conclude that Omuamua was in fact a technological object of alien origin, perhaps a probe that sped up as it encountered radio signals from Earth or a discarded solar sail catching the sun’s energy as it passed.

All very exciting, but unfortunately the “technoisignature” hypothesis was quickly picked apart by other scientists. For one thing, Oumuamua’s shape has proven to be contentious, with some interpreting the data as suggesting a flat, tumbling object rather than the interestingly artificial-seeming space tube that initial reports indicated (the object was too small and far away to observe visually as anything more than a point of light, and thus astronomers must infer its potential properties from other types of observations). 

More damaging to the alien probe idea is that there have been multiple proposed explanations for Oumuamua’s acceleration, all involving gaseous ejections caused by the sun melting ice on and within it. None of these have been proven, and in fact several have some pretty big holes in them, but the fact that astronomers can come up with plausible natural explanations means that the alien hypothesis must remain on the bottom shelf for now, even if we can’t discard it entirely.

I think that’s the source of Oumuamua’s allure: the fact that without getting a good look at it up-close, we will probably never definitively rule out the possibility that it was some sort of alien spacecraft. There are in fact several potential proposals on the table to do just that by sending out probes to catch up with it (we still know where it is and where it’s going), something which is apparently considered to be technologically feasible within the next twenty-five years.

Regardless of whether that ever happens, Oumuamua’s brief visit has gotten astronomers looking more carefully for interstellar visitors, and they spotted another one in 2019. Even if Oumuamua was just an oddly-shaped asteroid venting gasses into space, at least we’re watching if something more otherworldly does ever pass us by.

“Would you, could you, on a train?”

On the 29th of September, 2019, a commuter train ploughed into the Hoboken train terminal in New Jersey at high speed, killing one person and injuring 114. The engineer in charge of the train claimed to have no memory of the seconds leading up to the impact. As of this writing the investigation is still ongoing, with sleep apnea apparently being proposed as a possible explanation.

Somewhat mysterious on its own, but here’s the interesting part. Two days before the accident, a TV channel in upstate New York broadcast the following eerie emergency alert message:

Civil authorities have issued a Hazardous Materials Warning for The United States. Effective until September 29, 02:16 AM EDT. Would you. Could you. On a Train? Wait for further instructions.

Quite uncanny, however after some back and forth between the TV channel and FEMA, an explanation came into focus: a software developer had been testing the Emergency Message System with Dr. Seuss quotes and had accidentally pushed the messages out to participating TV channels nationwide (it was not in fact localised to New York, as was initially reported).

The more conspiratorially-minded obviously believe this is a lie, but none of them seem to be able to give a plausible explanation for what did happen. The implicit suggestion is that the train crash was planned in advance and the EMS alert was to…warn people, I guess? Why would the government, or FEMA, or the New World Order, or whoever, warn people of their upcoming nefarious plan? For that matter, why would they want to crash a train into a station in New Jersey in the first place?

I think we can chalk this one up to a spooky coincidence and nothing more.

Beebe’s Abyssal Fishos

In the early 1930s William Beebe descended into the depths of the ocean in a bathysphere in order to look at the terrifying nightmare fish that dwell there. As far as we know, he and bathysphere engineer Otis Barton were the first humans to ever set eyes on that spooky realm.

During his adventures, Beebe reported seeing several species of large deep-sea fish that have never been seen again since. For reasons unknown he gave them names that make them sound like world bosses in an MMORPG: the Abyssal Rainbow Gar, the Pallid Sailfin, the Five-Lined Constellation Fish, etc. In addition to presumably dropping excellent loot, these deepwater bois are considered to be some of the more credible of the popular cryptid species, in that there’s a decent chance they’re actually real and not the result of a drunk farmer seeing an owl in the middle of the night.

At least, that’s the common assumption. I was surprised upon encountering Beebe’s fishes (that’s apparently the grammatically correct way of saying it) that most commentators, even sober scientific ones, tend to assume that they really were distinct species and not Beebe and Barton misidentifying fish that are now known to science under different names. I think this might be giving them a little too much credit.

The bathysphere expeditions involved Beebe and co peering into the pitch-black water out of tiny, thick windows with the aid of a 1930s-era electric light. Frankly, under those conditions I’m kind of surprised they saw anything at all, much less accurately described whatever happened to swim past them. I also think it strains credibility that the very first person to ever venture that deep into the ocean happened to see a bunch of stuff that no one else in the last 90 years has managed to find again.

Still, it’s true that there’s a lot of ocean down there, and I’m sure as fuck not going to go down myself and check. Maybe Beebe‘s enigmatic aquatic pals were real.

Baltic Sea Anomaly

This one’s actually kind of boring, but I’m inherently drawn to any unsolved mystery with “anomaly” in its name (ditto for “event” or “entity”).

The Baltic Sea Anomaly is a circular rocky thing at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, detected by radar. Since it’s circular, some people suggested it might be a crashed UFO.

That’s…pretty much it. The only reason anyone thinks this could be anything unusual is because the Daily Mail published a bullshit story about it, and because it’s vaguely circle-shaped. Rock samples recovered from the anomaly were studied and showed no signs of anything unusual.

Next.

Black-Eyed Children

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure why this is on the iceberg chart at all, since I’d characterize it as much more of an urban legend or modern folklore than an unsolved mystery.

Basically, the idea is that people (primarily in the US) have been having encounters with spooky children whose eyes are completely black. Generally the kids will ring the doorbell in the middle of the night claiming to be lost or in some kind of distress and asking to be let in, the person telling the story will decline, then something will happen suggesting that if they had invited the child inside some terrible fate would have befallen them. The story has obvious parallels with vampire and fairy folklore, mixed in with modern paranoia (they’re sometimes linked to aliens, Men In Black, and sinister government experiments).

Like I said, I don’t think this really belongs on an unsolved mysteries berg since it’s very clearly fictional; even the early “sightings” are written more like spooky campfire stories than something that was ever intended to be taken seriously. Still, it’s a cool concept for an urban legend, and it’s kind of interesting that as far as I can tell the mythology of the Black-Eyed Children has never really advanced beyond the basic outline I described above.

The Beast of Bodmin Moor

I’m going to talk about something called a “phantom wild cat” in this entry, and to avoid disappointment I have to make clear up front that this term refers to large cats like panthers spotted outside of their usual environments, not panthers that are ghosts. I know, I know. The alternate term “alien big cat” is even more misleading.

The explanation for the phenomenon–assuming it’s not just people making shit up–is that the phantom kitties in question are most likely escapees or abandoned animals from a private menagerie. In some places like the eastern US it’s theorised that they could be remnant populations of species thought to be locally extinct like mountain lions, but that’s obviously a little harder to believe when it comes to Cornwall, where the Beast Of Bodmin Moor was spotted.

This refers to one or more panther-like cats spotted in the rural region of Bodmin Moor. The case is contentious because the length of time over which the sightings occurred and the number of sightings seem to suggest a stable breeding population of cats rather than one or two zoo escapees, a possibility that biologists severely doubt due to the lack of available food in the area.

On the other hand there’s this photo, apparently taken through binoculars in the 90s, and this video footage from thirteen years ago, both of which do indeed show a large black feline. To be honest I’m not entirely sure I believe that the photo isn’t just of an ordinary black house cat–the head shape looks much more like a domestic cat than a jaguar to me–and the video footage is a little too low-quality and distant to make out the animal’s size for certain.

I have no trouble believing in the “zoo escapee” theory–there’s nothing about it that’s particularly implausible, and enough people have reported seeing something in Bodmon Moor and elsewhere that I’m hesitant to dismiss them all. The more exciting idea of a hidden breeding population in England is, however, almost certainly false.

The Disappearance of Amy Lynn Bradley

Our first missing persons case. In March of 1998 Amy Lynn Bradley, aged 23, disappeared from the Royal Carribean cruise ship Rhapsody Of The Seas while sailing to Curacao. People actually go missing from cruise ships fairly often–a fact that cruise lines are not enthusiastic about discussing, for obvious reasons–and the explanation is usually fairly obvious: the person in question ended up in the ocean, either by accident, of their own accord or via foul play. Cruise ships travel very fast and take a long time to slow down and maneuver, so if you go overboard in the open sea and no one sees it happening, your chances of getting rescued are basically zero (a statistic I saw a while back said that the chance of rescue even if the alarm is raised immediately is only something like 25%).

The circumstances of Amy’s disappearance have made many people theorise that something a little more unusual might have taken place. Last seen sleeping on the balcony of the cabin she was sharing with her brother, crew were alerted to her disappearance very soon after it happened. Amy’s family believed that she had been kidnapped and wanted the upcoming disembarkation at Curacao halted so the ship could be searched, but the crew shot down this request. Alongside this were various oddities–strange attention from ship staff, photos of Amy not showing up in the on-board picture gallery shop, a supposed sighting of Amy in a brothel and in the company of two men in Curacao–leading to the theory that she had been trafficked into sexual slavery, possibly with the assistance of cruise line staff.

To be honest, I’ve never found the “human trafficking” theory very plausible (actually I don’t find most human trafficking theories when it comes to missing people plausible, but I’ll focus on this case for now). Amy was last seen on the balcony of a room occupied by other people, which means that for her to have been kidnapped she either would have had to leave, or the kidnappers would have had to enter the cabin, either of which would probably have woken someone up. The fact of the matter is, if she was last seen on a balcony, then the most obvious way she exited the ship was off said balcony.

What about the strange behaviour of the crew? Well, the captain had perfectly obvious and mundane reasons for not wanting to halt the disembarkation that don’t involve him being part of a sex trafficking conspiracy, the attention she was getting from the staff is easily explained by high-seas horniness (apparently staff/guest hook-ups happen on these ships a lot despite being strictly against the rules), and the thing with the missing photos could be explained by some unknown staff member removing them out of respect.

As for the sightings, there is no evidence backing them up. The one in the brothel in particular was only revealed years after the fact, by a retired naval officer who supposedly didn’t come forward earlier due to fears that it would jeopardize his career. All of the others could easily be cases of misidentification, or people just inventing shit for the lulz.

The investigators’ reasons for shooting down the woman-overboard theory is, I have to say, a little bizarre: Amy was a strong swimmer, and her body was never found. How strong a swimmer someone is doesn’t really matter when they’re in open water far from land, and as for her body not being found, there are a lot of reasons why that might be the case. Maybe she hit her head on the way down and was already unconscious when she went into the water, maybe a shark dragged her under, maybe she just drifted further than anyone expected. Or for that matter, maybe they just didn’t see her.

At the end of the day, there is no actual evidence that Amy ever left the Rhapsody Of The Seas after it docked at Curacao. Unless her body is somehow still on board, that only leaves one viable explanation in my mind.