25 Greatest Unsolved Mysteries Ever

1. The Lost City of Atlantis

The City of Atlantis has been imagined as the crowning city of Neptune, where mermaids and mermen live. But based on what Plato has discussed during his time, specifically with his two dialogues Timaeus and Critias, it specifically mentioned the existence of Atlantis based on the stories being heard during the journeys, and how Atlantis was in its prime state, thus giving a clue that the place did exist as Plato was a real entity. Now that it sunk into the deep, many are still wondering if it is real, knowing that there are certain objects underwater that may be the remnants of this once beautiful city.

2. The Taos Hum

In the small town of Taos, New Mexico, there is a certain buzz often heard on the horizon that can be compared to the sound of a distant diesel engine. Although it can be heard by the naked ear, various sound detection devices are not able to pick it up. This is known as the Taos Hum and up to this day, no one still knows how this sound is being created.

3. Voynich Manuscript

The Voynich manuscript was written in a language that men through the centuries have tried to decode to no avail. The only idea anyone has of its origin are the drawings found on various pages.

4. Jack the Ripper

The name Jack the Ripper has been heard in many shows and movies, pertaining to the serial killer who murdered 11 women in London’s east end in the late 1800 s but was never identified. ′Most of his victims were prostitutes, whose bodies were mutilated beyond recognition and their throats slashed.

5. Bermuda Triangle

Known as the Bermuda Triangle, this legendary expanse of ocean can be found between the points of Miami, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico. Pilots often tell of their instruments going haywire and numerous ships have been lost at sea. With explanations ranging from gas bubbles to aliens, no one is sure what is behind the strange phenomena.

FROM ; http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/unexplained-mysteries.html

The Bermuda Triangle is held responsible for the disappearance of countless airplanes and boats in the ocean between Florida, San Juan, and Bermuda. This area is one of the most heavily sailed shipping lanes in the world, with vessels crossing through daily for ports in the Americas, Europe and the Caribbean Islands.

So why do people think there are unexplained mysteries going on in this vast triangle of ocean?

Over the years, there have been a huge number of disappearances that happened in mysterious circumstances, supposedly falling beyond the possibilities of human error, equipment failure or natural disasters. Many paranormal theories talk of a suspension of the laws of physics.

For instance, the first unexplained event occurred in the 1950s when the story of Flight 19 came to light, detailing a group of five US Navy bombers on a training mission. The flight leader was reported to have said: "We are entering white water, nothing seems right. We don't know

where we are, the water is green, no white." It was also claimed that Navy officials said the planes "flew off to Mars".

So, do multiple airplane and boat disappearances over a patch of ocean count as unexplained mysteries? Skeptics say no. They point out that such incidents have been greatly embellished, that ships have sunk in many places, and the Bermuda Triangle is responsible for no more disappearances than any other area of ocean.

Phew. Now we can all go vacation in the Caribbean in peace...

6. Kryptos

Just outside the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, you will behold a statue that has coded encryptions on its surface. This very captivating sculpture was created by Jim Sanborn to show that everything can be resolved and decoded with the use of patterns and clues. Of the four inscription sections that were included, only the first three have been cracked. But the fourth? Not even the brilliant minds in the CIA were able to get to the bottom of it.

FROM : http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/17-05/ff_kryptos?currentPage=all

The most celebrated inscription at the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, used to be the biblical phrase chiseled into marble in the main lobby: "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." But in recent years, another text has been the subject of intense scrutiny inside the Company and out: 865 characters of seeming gibberish, punched out of half-inch-thick copper in a courtyard.

It's part of a sculpture called Kryptos, created by DC artist James Sanborn. He got the commission in 1988, when the CIA was constructing a new building behind its original headquarters. The agency wanted an outdoor installation for the area between the two buildings, so a solicitation went out for a piece of public art that the general public would never see. Sanborn named his proposal after the Greek word for hidden. The work is a meditation on the nature of secrecy and the elusiveness of truth, its message written entirely in code.

Almost 20 years after its dedication, the text has yet to be fully deciphered. A bleary-eyed global community of self-styled cryptanalysts—along with some of the agency's own staffers—has seen three of its four sections solved, revealing evocative prose that only makes the puzzle more confusing. Still uncracked are the 97 characters of the fourth part (known as K4 in Kryptos-speak). And the longer the deadlock continues, the crazier people get.

Whether or not our top spooks intended it, the persistent opaqueness of Kryptos subversively embodies the nature of the CIA itself—and serves as a reminder of why secrecy and subterfuge so fascinate us. "The whole thing is about the power of secrecy," Sanborn tells me when I visit his studio, a barnlike structure on Jimmy Island in Chesapeake Bay (population: 2). He is 6'7", bearded, and looks a bit younger than his 63 years. Looming behind him is his latest work in progress, a 28-foot-high re-creation of the world's first particle accelerator, surrounded by some of the original hardware from the Manhattan Project. The atomic gear fits nicely with the thrust of Sanborn's oeuvre, which centers on what he calls invisible forces.

With Kryptos, Sanborn has made his strongest statement about what we don't see and can't know. "He designed a piece that would resonate with this workforce in particular," says Toni Hiley, who curates the employees-only CIA museum. Sanborn's ambitious work includes the 9-foot 11-inch-high main sculpture—an S-shaped wave of copper with cut-out letters, anchored by an 11-foot column of petrified wood—and huge pieces of granite abutting a low fountain. And although most of the installation resides in a space near the CIA cafeteria, where analysts and spies can enjoy it when they eat outside, Kryptos extends beyond the courtyard to the other side of the new building. There, copper plates near the entrance bear snippets of Morse code, and a naturally magnetized lodestone sits by a compass rose etched in granite.

The sculpture named Kryptos at CIA headquarters contains a secret message — but not even the agency's brightest can crack its code. Photo: Adrian Gaut

"People call me an agent of Satan," says artist Sanborn, "because I won't tell my secret." Photo: Adrian Gaut

The heart of the piece, though, is the encrypted text, scrambled, Sanborn says, by "a coding system that would unravel itself slowly over a period of time."

When he began the work, Sanborn knew very little about cryptography, so he reluctantly accepted the CIA's offer to work with Ed Scheidt, who had just retired as head of Langley's Cryptographic Center. Scheidt himself was serving two masters. "I was reminded of my need to preserve the agency's secrets," Scheidt says. "You know, don't tell him the current way of doing business. And don't create something that you cannot break—but at the same time, make it something that will last a while."

Scheidt schooled Sanborn in cryptographic techniques employed from the late 19th century until World War II, when field agents had to use pencil and paper to encode and decode their messages. (These days, of course, cryptography is all about rugged computer algorithms using long mathematical keys.) After experimenting with a range of techniques, including poly-alphabetic substitution, shifting matrices, and transposition, the two arrived at a form of old-school, artisanal cryptography that they felt would hold off code breakers long enough to generate some suspense. The solutions, however, were Sanborn's alone, and he did not share them with Scheidt. "I assumed the first three sections would be deciphered in a matter of weeks, perhaps months," Sanborn says. Scheidt figured the whole puzzle would be solved in less than seven years.

During the two years of construction, there were moments of intrigue and paranoia, in keeping with the subject matter and the client. "We had to play a little on the clandestine side," says Scheidt, who talks of unnamed observers outside armed with long-range cameras and high-intensity microphones. "We had people with ladders climbing up the walls of my studio trying to photograph inside," Sanborn says. He came to believe that factions within the CIA wanted to kill the project. There were unexplained obstacles. For instance, he says, "one day a big truckload of stone for the courtyard disappeared. Never found. I saw it in the evening, went back in the morning, and it had vanished. Nobody would tell me what happened to it."

Sanborn finished the sculpture in time for a November 1990 dedication. The agency released the enciphered text, and a frenzy erupted in the crypto world as some of the best—and wackiest—cryptanalytic talent set to work. But it took them more than seven years, not the few months Sanborn had expected, to crack sections K1, K2, and K3. The first code breaker, a CIA employee named David Stein, spent 400 hours working by hand on his own time. Stein, who described the emergence of the first passage as a religious experience, revealed his partial solution to a packed auditorium at Langley in February 1998. But not a word was leaked to the press. Sixteen months later, Jim Gillogly, an LA-area cryptanalyst used a Pentium II computer and some custom software to crack the same three sections. When news of Gillogly's success broke, the CIA publicized Stein's earlier crack.

James Sanborn buried his sculpture's message so deeply that a CIA staffer took seven years to solve just the first three sections. Here's what we know.

The first section, K1, uses a modified Vigenère cipher. It's encrypted through substitution—each letter corresponds to another—and can be solved only with the alphabetic rows of letters on the right. The keywords, which help determine the substitutions, are KRYPTOS and PALIMPSEST. A misspelling—in this case IQLUSION—may be a clue to cracking K4.

K2, like the first section, was also encrypted using the alphabets on the right. One new trick Sanborn used, though, was to insert an X between some sentences, making it harder to crack the code by tabulating letter frequency. The keywords here are KRYPTOS and ABSCISSA. And there's another intriguing misspelling: UNDERGRUUND.

A different cryptographic technique was used for K3: transposition. All the letters are jumbled and can be deciphered only by uncovering the complex matrices and mathematics that determined their misplacement. Of course, there is a misspelling (DESPARATLY), and the last sentence (CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING?) is strangely bracketed by an X and a Q.

Sanborn intentionally made K4 much harder to crack, hinting that the plaintext itself is not standard English and would require a second level of cryptanalysis. Misspellings and other anomalies in previous sections may help. Some suspect that clues are present in other parts of the installation: the Morse code, the compass rose, or perhaps the adjacent fountain.

But if anyone expected that solving the first three sections would lead to a quick resolution of the whole puzzle, their hopes were soon dashed. The partial solutions only deepened the confusion.

K1 is a passage written by Sanborn. "I tried to make it sound good and be inscrutable enough to be interesting," he says. Judge for yourself how well he did: "Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion." Yes, iqlusion—one of several misspellings that Sanborn says are intentional. The second section reads like a telegraph transmission. There's a reference to a magnetic field and information transmitted to a specific latitude and longitude—geo-coordinates for a location a couple of hundred feet south of the sculpture itself (a spot where nothing of apparent interest lies).

K3 paraphrases a diary entry of anthropologist Howard Carter from his 1922 discovery of King Tut's tomb, ending with a question: "Can you see anything?" When Gillogly turned up that passage, he says, he had "the same excitement and exultation that Carter described. In a way, it seems that the plaintext is a metaphor for the work of the code breaker, or perhaps of the CIA itself."

The 97 characters of K4 remain impenetrable. They have become, as one would-be cracker calls it, the Everest of codes. Both Scheidt and Sanborn confirm that they intended the final segment to be the biggest challenge. There are endless theories about how to solve it. Is access to the sculpture required? Is the Morse code a clue? Every aspect of the project has come under electron-microscopic scrutiny, as thousands of people—hardcore cryptographers and amateur code breakers alike—have taken a whack at it. Some have gone off the deep end: A Michigan man abandoned his computer-software business to do construction so he'd have more time to work on it. Thirteen hundred members of a fanatical Yahoo group try to move the ball forward with everything from complex math to astrology. One typical Kryptos maniac is Randy Thompson, a 43-year-old physicist who has devoted three years to the problem. "I think I'm onto the solution," he says. "It could happen tomorrow, or it could take the rest of my life." Meanwhile, some of the seekers are getting tired. "I just want to see it solved," says Elonka Dunin, a 50-year-old St. Louis game developer who runs a clearinghouse site for Kryptos information and gossip. "I want it off my plate."

Making the effort more complicated is the fact that the puzzle maker is alive and, in theory at least, a potential resource. For years, there has been a delicate pas de deux between the artist and the rabid Kryptos community. Every word Sanborn utters is eagerly examined for hints. But they also have to wonder whether he's trying to help them or throw them off track. Scheidt says that this process parallels the work of the CIA: "The intelligence picture includes mirrors and obfuscation."

Photo: Adrian Gaut

"It's not my intent to put out disinformation," Sanborn says. "I'm a benevolent cryptographer." Some think otherwise, and Sanborn occasionally receives messages from people enraged that he knows the secret and they don't. "It's the fact that I have some sort of power," he says. "You get stalkers. I don't know how they get my cell numbers and everything off the Internet, but

they do. People have called me and said pretty terrible things. There are some who say I'm an agent of Satan because I have a secret I won't tell."

Though Sanborn's usual practice is to stay in the background, every so often he feels obliged to comment. In 2005, he refuted author Dan Brown's claim that the "WW" in the plaintext of K3 could be inverted to "MM," implying Mary Magdalene. (Brown included pieces of Kryptos on the book jacket of The Da Vinci Code and has hinted that his next novel will draw on the CIA sculpture, a prospect that deeply annoys Sanborn.)

Intentional or not, Sanborn's comments (or lack thereof) seem to generate an added layer of confusion. Even a straightforward question, like who besides him knows the solution, opens up new wormholes. The official story is that Sanborn shared the answer with only one person, the CIA director at the time, William Webster. Indeed, the decoded K3 text reads in part, "Who knows the exact location only ww." Sanborn has confirmed that these letters refer to Webster (not Mary Magdalene). And in 1999, Webster himself told The New York Times that the solution was "philosophical and obscure."

But Sanborn also claims that the envelope he gave Webster didn't contain the complete answer. "Nobody has it all," he says. "I tricked them."

So, Webster really doesn't know?

"No," says Sanborn, who has taken measures to ensure that someone will be able to confirm a successful solution even after he dies. He adds that even he doesn't know the exact solution anymore. "If somebody tried to torture me, I couldn't tell them," he says. "I haven't looked at the plaintext of K4 in a long time, and I don't have a very good memory, so I don't really know what it says." What does the CIA make of all this? "When it comes to the solution," says spokesperson Marie Harf, "those who need to know, know."

If anyone manages to solve the last cipher, that won't end the hunt for the ultimate truth about Kryptos. "There may be more to the puzzle than what you see," Scheidt says. "Just because you broke it doesn't mean you have the answer." All of this leads one to ask: Is there a solution? Sanborn insists there is—but he would be just as happy if no one ever discovered it. "In some ways, I'd rather die knowing it wasn't cracked," he says. "Once an artwork loses its mystery, it's lost a lot."

The day I visited Kryptos, a rare snowstorm in Virginia had blanketed the courtyard in white. I circled the sculpture carefully, marveling at the way the colors and texture of the surrounding landscape affected the panels, as some character strings became highlighted in white and other phrases shimmered, reflecting the dull light bouncing off the windows. I examined all the pieces, brushing aside the snow to uncover the Morse code and the compass rose. It was like unearthing hieroglyphs in some ancient ruin. Agents and bureaucrats shuffled past, deep in

thought, clutching cups of coffee from the onsite Starbucks. In their midst, Jim Sanborn's statement in copper, wood, and granite remains, proof that even in the house of spies, some truths may never be found.

7. Shepherd’s Monument Inscription

In Staffordshire, England, there is a sculpture that has invited the wits and intellect of many intellectuals in an attempt to decode an inscription reading DOUOSVAVVM. Although the Shepherd’s Monument was constructed back in the 18th century, the letters found therein were never solved, even 250 years after it was completed.

8. Tamam Shud

Back in December 1948, an unidentified man was found dead in Somerton Beach, located in Adelaide, Australia. Found in one of his pockets was a piece of paper with the words “Tamam Shud” written on it. The words were translated “finished” or “ended” based on excerpts found in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Although governments around the world have tried to identify the man his identity has remained mystery.

9. Zodiac Letters

During the 1960s and 1970s, there was a certain criminal in the San Francisco Bay area that was identified as the Zodiac killer for the mind-boggling letters he sent to the police and to the press. Although one of the four letters were cracked, which contained a very disturbing message, the other three have never been identified, even until now.

10. Georgia Guidestones

Also identified as the American version of Stonehenge, the Georgia Guidestones located in Elbert County are shrouded in mystery, although they were erected only in 1979. Written on the walls are 10 “new commandments” written in English, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, China, Russia, and Spanish although no one is sure why or for whom they were meant.

11. Rongorongo

In the mysterious Easter Islands where the moai stands, a set of glyphs have been discovered, called the Rongorongo. These glyphs have never been deciphered although they may contain clues concerning the huge heads found scattered around the island.

12. The Loch Ness Monster

For ages, people have been hearing about the Loch Ness monster and how it baffled everyone thinking that it is a creature unlike any other. There have been many sightings over the years and photos and videos of actual footage have been checked and looked at time and time again, confirming if it could be some kind of sea serpent or a descendant of the dinosaurs. Even up today, as some are claiming, it still exists and swims under the waters.

FROM : http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/unexplained-mysteries.html

The Loch Ness Monster is a prehistoric creature thought to inhabit the Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands. As lake monsters go, Scotland has tales of a fair few, with Nessie gaining the most popularity of all on the back of anecdotal evidence.

Nessie first hit the headlines in 1933 when a story was published in the Inverness Courier. The report quoted a Londoner who had visited a few weeks earlier as seeing: "a most extraordinary form of animal... the nearest approach to a dragon or pre-historic animal that I have ever seen in my life."

After that, more sightings were reported and this unexplained phenomena hit international headlines. That same year, one motorcyclist claimed to nearly hit Nessie late one night as it

lumbered across the road and slid back into the loch. Soon, apparent photos of the Loch Ness Monster were published.

In 1960, an aeronautical engineer filmed a hump crossing the water in Loch Ness in a powerful wake unlike that of a boat.

Years later, digital enhancement of the footage revealed what seemed to be the rear body, flippers, and two more humps of a plesiosaur-like body. The technician said: "Before I saw the film, I thought the Loch Ness Monster was a load of rubbish. Having done the enhancement, I'm not so sure."

There's no doubt that the story of Nessie has drawn huge tourist interest to the famed Loch Ness. But should it be considered one of the genuine unexplained mysteries of the world? While some people believe the monster is a living plesiosaur, New Scientist points out that such a creature could not physically lift its head up out of the water like the photos and anecdotes suggest.

The most compelling evidence of its non-existence is that the loch is a mere 10,000 years old - and was frozen solid for about 20,000 years before that. For a prehistoric monster claimed to be millions of years old, the numbers just don't add up.

BigfootAlso known as Sasquatch, bigfoot is supposedly a creature that lives in the snowy mountainous regions of the United States and Canada. It may be identified as a gorilla at first, however, its walking posture can be compared to that of a man’s.13Black Dahlia Murder22-year old Elizabeth Short was very active at promoting herself into showbiz at the time the Black Dahlia murder occurred, however, no one knew of the killer or who actually did the murder.12StonehengeWhile Stonehenge is a very fascinating structure due to the big rocks that stand atop one another, the biggest mystery isn’t how it was created but why.11Shroud of TurinThe shroud containing an imprint of a human face has been one of the main focuses of Christian research, as many have suggested that the person’s face in the shroud could be Jesus Christ of Nazareth.