Everybody loves a good mystery—and unsolved mysteries are all the more captivating. (After all, The Da Vinci Code didn’t make a bazillion dollars because people are really into the Mona Lisa!) With that in mind, here are just a few of the top unsolved mysteries in North America—ones that just may stay that way forever. Unless some sleuth finds that one missing piece to the puzzle that will reveal the truth. Who knows, maybe you’re that someone. There’s a Sherlock Holmes born every day.
1 | Georgia Guidestones
Sometimes called the “American Stonehenge,” the granite monument was built in 1979 in Elbert County, Georgia, in a field off Highway 77. It contains ten commandments for “an Age of Reason,” written in eight languages — English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese and Russian.
But these aren’t commandments like you’d find in the Old Testament. Some of the messages written on these four granite slabs, each almost 20 feet tall, are controversial, like this one: “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.” Wha?
Stranger still, nobody is sure who paid for all this. The man claiming responsibility went by the pseudonym “R.C. Christian,” and even the crew that built the monument for him know nothing about his true identity. There are plenty of wild conspiracy theories, like that the monument was commissioned by a Luciferian secret society announcing the beginnings of a new world order, but the truth remains elusive—and for now, it’s one of the most impressive unsolved mysteries of the world that you can find on the side of the road.
2 | Boston Heist Paintings
The world’s biggest unsolved art heist happened almost thirty years ago, and we’re still no closer to finding what happened to all that priceless art.
It happened on the night of March 18th, 1990, when two art thieves, disguised as police officers, tricked security guards at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum into letting them inside late at night. They handcuffed the guards and made off with thirteen famous paintings by artists like Rembrandt (“Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee”), Vermeer (” The Concert”), and Flinck (“Landscape with an Obelisk”), for a total value estimated to be around $500 million.
There have been a lot of crazy ideas about who masterminded this unsolved mystery, from mobsters to a California screenwriter to the Irish Republican Army to South Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger. But so far, there’ve been no promising leads. However, the museum hasn’t given up hope of finding the lost art. In January, they extended indefinitely their $10 million reward for anyone who helps recover the missing masterpieces. Until then, it remains one of the art world’s top unsolved mysteries.
3 | Bird Deaths in Arkansas
On New Year’s Eve in 2010, in the small town of Beebe, Arkansas, 5,000 blackbirds freaked out and slammed into buildings, telephone poles, and trees, dying instantly. It was disconcerting when it happened, but at least there was a plausible explanation. Celebratory fireworks had spooked the birds, according to Arkansas officials, causing them to “fly all over the place.” It was a one-time occurrence that would never happen again.
Except it happened the very next year, on New Year’s Eve 2011, despite the ban on fireworks in Beebe to make sure there weren’t any more mass bird casualties. Only 200 bird died this time, but that didn’t make it any less bizarre. Theorists developed crazy ideas—as they usually do for unsolved mysteries—that the bird deaths were an ominous omen about the Mayan calendar, signaling the end of the world, which of course turned out not to be true. (Hey, the apocalypse didn’t come, did it?) But no explanations that really made sense.
If birds were freaked out by fireworks, why weren’t New Year’s Eve bird deaths more common? And how to explain the second year in a row of birds falling from the sky? It hasn’t happened since, but the mystery of what killed all those Beebe remains a chilling riddle and one of the grimmer mysteries of the world.
4 | Kryptos
Outside CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, there’s a peculiar-looking statue, 12 feet tall and made of curved copper, that was first unveiled in 1990. Named Kryptos—an ancient Greek word for “secret” or “hidden”—it contains 1800 characters on four encrypted messages, three of which have already been solved, but one that remains one of the top unsolved mysteries.
Jim Sanborn, the sculptor who created it, revealed another clue in 2014, something to do with BERLIN and CLOCK. We don’t get it either, but thousands of professional and amateur cryptographers are still trying to decode the final unsolved mystery, which is just 97 letters long.
5 | Beale Ciphers
It sounds like one of those Old West legends that should probably be taken with a grain of salt.
Sometime in the 1800s, the story goes, a Virginian named Thomas J. Beale discovered a fortune in gold and silver while hunting for buffalo north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. He took the treasure back to Virginia and buried it there, somewhere near Bedford County. As a sort of treasure map, he wrote three encrypted messages, which held the secrets to finding his massive fortune (worth an estimated $43 million in 2018 dollars).
He left the letters with a friend, and after Beale died (taking the secrets with him), they were published in 1885 as “The Beale Papers.” The search has been ongoing ever since. So far only one of the ciphertexts has been cracked, which revealed the contents of Beale’s treasure but not where to find it. There are plenty of theories floating around, including that the whole thing might’ve been a hoax by Edgar Allan Poe.
6 | The KGC
The Knights of the Golden Circle, or KGC for short, were a secret society of wealthy Southern loyalists formed just before the Civil War, devoted not just to defending their values (i.e. owning all the slaves they wanted) but conquering parts of Mexico, Central America, and Cuba to create a Confederate empire. Their members had an abundance of gold and weapons, and purportedly some infamous members, including Jesse James (whose robberies may have contributed to the KGC secret stash) and John Wilkes Booth.
In fact, the assassination of President Abraham Lincolnmay have been a KGC plot from the beginning, at least according to word-of-mouth legends. The KGC disappeared just a few decades after the war ended, or so it appeared, leaving behind one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the world. There’s still speculation that they just went deeper into hiding, and continue their plots to overthrow the US federal government. Oh, and they may have buried treasure somewhere, waiting to be discovered (or used to fund a second Civil War, whichever comes first). It’s possible that gold coins discovered by a California couple in 2014 were originally hidden there by the KGC.
7 | The Wow! Signal
It was 1977, and astronomer Jerry Ehman was using a radio signal detector from Ohio State University to scan the stars around the constellation Sagittarius. He picked up a 72-second radio frequency that seemed to be coming from deep space. He wrote “Wow!” in the margin of his computer printout, which is probably the most breezy reaction ever to thinking you may’ve just made contact with extraterrestrials.
There’ve been attempts at debunkings the story in recent years, like a 2017 theory that it was just a pair of comets passing near our planet. But the “no way it was aliens” explanations have been just as quickly refuted. Have aliens been trying to make contact since the first Star Wars was released? Nobody knows for sure!
8 | The Treasure of Dutch Schultz
Dutch Schultz was a gangster in the 20s and 30s, who made his fortune by bootlegging alcohol and the numbers racket. But like all gangsters, he was pretty sure somebody was going to try and shoot him. Also like a lot of gangsters, he had boatloads of money. So he hid it, somewhere in the ballpark of $5 to $9 million in cash, gold, and jewels.
He put it in an iron box or steel suitcase, drove it out to the Catskill Mountains, near Phoenicia, New York, with his bodyguard “Lulu” and buried it. He may’ve even marked a nearby tree with an “X.” Sure enough, he was murdered not long after, gunned down in a New Jersey chophouse in 1935. His treasure, if he ever existed at all, is still out there. It’s just waiting for somebody to notice a tree with a big X marked on it.
9 | The Phoenix Lights
What exactly did people see over the skies over Phoenix on March 13, 1997? Was it a secret military spacecraft? A natural phenomenon? Or perhaps alien visitors from another galaxy? Whatever it was, thousands of Arizonans saw the unusual lights in the sky, which looked like a huge upside-down V that moved slowly overhead, made no sound, and occasionally stopped to hover in one location. It was either the size of several football fields or, depending on who you asked, a mile wide.
Even Escape From New York actor Kurt Russell saw the strange light show while landing his private plane in Phoenix. Whatever all those people witnessed — the official explanation is that it was just military flares — it had such a profound effect that many of those who saw… whatever it was they saw… gather together every year in the foothills of the McDowell Mountains outside of Phoenix to talk about their experience and try to figure out, “What the heck was that?”
10 | DB Cooper
On Nov. 24, 1971, a guy known only as DB Cooper boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 305 for a short flight from Portland to Seattle, and hijacked it using a briefcase that he claimed contained a bomb.
In Seattle, he released all 36 passengers and demanded that authorities give him $200,000 and several parachutes. Then he instructed the pilots to fly to Mexico and remain slow and low to the ground, with the rear door unlocked. That was the last anybody saw of him.
Did he jump successfully from the plane and escape with thousands? Nobody knows for sure. In 1980, a boy in Portland uncovered bundles of cash in a sand pit, worth around $5800 and matching the serial numbers of the missing cash. The FBI has claimed that Cooper couldn’t have survived the jump, but they issued a new composite in 2017 of what he may look like today, which doesn’t sound like something you do if a suspect is assumed deceased.
