March 13th 2020: Thirteen Mysteries

To celebrate Friday the 13th, I thought it would be interesting to talk about 13 unsolved mysteries that piqued mine as well as many other's curiosity.

1. The bizarre deaths of 5 thousand black birds in Beebe, Arkansas on New years Eve 2010. Followed strangely enough with the deaths of 200 more the following New Years Eve 2011 in the same town. The birds slammed themselves into buildings, trees, telephone poles, etc for no explainable reason, causing them to die instantly.

2. The disappearance of DB Cooper. The man who hijacked a plane in 1971 with 36 passengers. He released them after his demands for $200,000 and parachutes were met by authorities. He then had the pilots fly the plane to Mexico for his escape, that was the last anyone saw of him. In 1980, a pile of cash matching the serial numbers of the missing money was discovered. Despite this, Cooper was still assumed to be dead. However, the FBI released a new facial composite of what he would look like alive in 2017.

3. The forbidden secrets of Area 51, the remote Air Force Base in the middle of the Nevada desert. Of course the first and most assumed rumors for this base is that this is where the government stores aliens and UFOs. It's also said to be where the government controls our weather, time travel machines, mutants, etc. Everything you'd expect in a scifi is hidden deep behind those fences. The truth is that it's so top secret and heavily guarded that the theorists may actually be onto something.

4. The 13 human feet, usually still in sneakers, that have washed up on the shores of British Columbia since 2007.

5. The death of a wealthy couple in 1892, viciously axed to death in their own home, with the main suspect being his own daughter, Lizzie Borden, who lived with them and had been angry with her step-mother over finances. She was acquitted of all charges, but was she really innocent or had she gotten away with murder?

6. The gruesome murder of Elizabeth Short, later known as The Black Dalia, a 22 year old actress who was found with her body sliced in half and three inch gashes on either side of her mouth, giving her a clown-esque smile.

7. In 1981 the brutal beheading of a San Francisco transient, Leroy Carter Jr, left the lead detective, Sandi Gallant, suspecting a satanic cult by the name of Palo Mayombe. The detective believed the cult would make a potion from the brain and ears and then leave the head at the place of the murder 42 days later. The detective wasn't taken seriously and sure enough 42 days later the head was returned to the crime scene.

8. The student Elisa Lam, who went missing while staying at Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles, California in 2013. When the hotel offered footage, she is seen acting bizarrely in the elevator and hallway, at some points playing or hiding from someone. It's unclear where she went after she exited the elevator, but she was later discovered in the water tank. There were no signs of foul play, tests found no drugs or alcohol levels. It is believed to be accidental and she fell in and drowned, however the lids for the tanks are very heavy and the likeliness of a small woman moving it themselves is very slim. The creepier part of this story is that guests had been drinking the water from the tank where she had been decaying for weeks.

9. in 1957 two sisters Joanna (11), Jacqueline (6), and their friend Anthony had been struck by a car while walking to their church in England, tragically killing all three. The girls parents had prayed for their return and one year later their prayers might have been answered when they gave birth to twin girls Jennifer and Gillian. The younger twin, Jennifer, had birthmarks the same places Jacqueline had them. At the age of 2 the twins began asking for toys previously owned by the girls that the twins had never heard of or seen before. The twins pointed at the school the girls had attended and claimed it was their school and recalled playing on the playground. Dr. Ian Stevenson studied the case and concluded they were indeed the sisters reincarnated, after the age of five the memories vanished and they went on to live normal lives.

10. Frederick Valentich went missing in 1978 after a 125-mile training flight to King's Island near Melbourne, Australia. He had made contact with air traffic control inquiring if there were other aircrafts in the area, the answer from them was no. In the conversation that followed they asked if he could confirm it was an air craft to which he repeated several times with no. He described it as an elongated cigar shape having at least 4 lights and one green light that was shiny on the outside. Seven minutes after his initial inquiry all radio contact was lost. The last heard from him was "It is not an aircraft." There were several UFO and strange light sightings in the surrounding area that same night.

11. Pauline Picard (2) went missing from her family's farm in France in 1922. Several days later a little girl matching her description had been found wondering in a town 300 km away from the farm. She was identified by a picture and brought home. A month later however, a neighbor stumbled upon the mutilated and decomposing body of a young child with the clothes Pauline had been wearing when she went missing neatly folded next to the body alongside a skull of an adult male. What happened to Pauline, is the skull related to her death, why did they return Pauline's doppelganger and what happened to her after? This one really disturbs me.

12. The figure or figures known as The Phantom Attacker in Virginia or Mad Gasser of Mattoon in Illinois was declared to be just the figment of people's imagination despite the physical evidence and eyewitnesses at the scene of the attacks between 1933-1944, when the figure dressed in black would spray paralyzing gas into the windows of residents.

13. In the 1960s a bridge in Scotland, later nicknamed Dog Suicide Bridge, that attracted dozens of dogs to jump to their deaths into the still waters of the canal below. Stranger still, the dogs who survived the first first attempt returned to the bridge to jump again.