History's Mysteries

[nacho]

Kelly was such a loon. We need more people running around in homemade armor.

[RottingCorpse]

Visible Only From Above, Mystifying 'Nazca Lines' Discovered in Mideast

They stretch from Syria to Saudi Arabia, can be seen from the air but not the ground, and are virtually unknown to the public.

They are the Middle East's own version of the Nazca Lines — ancient "geolyphs," or drawings, that span deserts in southern Peru — and now, thanks to new satellite-mapping technologies, and an aerial photography program in Jordan, researchers are discovering more of them than ever before. They number well into the thousands.

Referred to by archaeologists as "wheels," these stone structures have a wide variety of designs, with a common one being a circle with spokes radiating inside. Researchers believe that they date back to antiquity, at least 2,000 years ago. They are often found on lava fields and range from 82 feet to 230 feet (25 meters to 70 meters) across.

 "In Jordan alone we've got stone-built structures that are far more numerous than (the) Nazca Lines, far more extensive in the area that they cover, and far older," said David Kennedy, a professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Western Australia.

Kennedy's new research, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, reveals that these wheels form part of a variety of stone landscapes. These include kites (stone structures used for funnelling and killing animals); pendants (lines of stone cairns that run from burials); and walls, mysterious structures that meander across the landscape for up to several hundred feet and have no apparent practical use.

His team's studies are part of a long-term aerial reconnaissance project that is looking at archaeological sites across Jordan. As of now, Kennedy and his colleagues are puzzled as to what the structures may have been used for or what meaning they held.
Fascinating structures

Kennedy's main area of expertise is in Roman archaeology, but he became fascinated by these structures when, as a student, he read accounts of Royal Air Force pilots flying over them in the 1920s on airmail routes across Jordan. "You can't not be fascinated by these things," Kennedy said.

Indeed, in 1927 RAF Flight Lt. Percy Maitland published an account of the ruins in the journal Antiquity. He reported encountering them over "lava country" and said that they, along with the other stone structures, are known to the Bedouin as the "works of the old men."

Kennedy and his team have been studying the structures using aerial photography and Google Earth, as the wheels are hard to pick up from the ground, Kennedy said.

"Sometimes when you're actually there on the site you can make out something of a pattern but not very easily," he said. "Whereas if you go up just a hundred feet or so it, for me, comes sharply into focus what the shape is."

The designs must have been clearer when they were originally built. "People have probably walked over them, walked past them, for centuries, millennia, without having any clear idea what the shape was."

(The team has created an archive of images of the wheels from various sites in the Middle East.)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/apaame

What were they used for?

So far, none of the wheels appears to have been excavated, something that makes dating them, and finding out their purpose, more difficult. Archaeologists studying them in the pre-Google Earth era speculated that they could be the remains of houses or cemeteries. Kennedy said that neither of these explanations seems to work out well.

"There seems to be some overarching cultural continuum in this area in which people felt there was a need to build structures that were circular."

Some of the wheels are found in isolation while others are clustered together. At one location, near the Azraq Oasis, hundreds of them can be found clustered into a dozen groups. "Some of these collections around Azraq are really quite remarkable," Kennedy said.

In Saudi Arabia, Kennedy's team has found wheel styles that are quite different: Some are rectangular and are not wheels at all; others are circular but contain two spokes forming a bar often aligned in the same direction that the sun rises and sets in the Middle East.

The ones in Jordan and Syria, on the other hand, have numerous spokes and do not seem to be aligned with any astronomical phenomena. "On looking at large numbers of these, over a number of years, I wasn't struck by any pattern in the way in which the spokes were laid out," Kennedy said.

Cairns are often found associated with the wheels. Sometimes they circle the perimeter of the wheel, other times they are in among the spokes. In Saudi Arabia some of the cairns look, from the air, like they are associated with ancient burials.

Dating the wheels is difficult, since they appear to be prehistoric, but could date to as recently as 2,000 years ago. The researchers have noted that the wheels are often found on top of kites, which date as far back as 9,000 years, but never vice versa. "That suggests that wheels are more recent than the kites," Kennedy said.

Amelia Sparavigna, a physics professor at Politecnico di Torino in Italy, told Live Science in an email that she agrees these structures can be referred to as geoglyphs in the same way as the Nazca Lines are. "If we define a 'geoglyph' as a wide sign on the ground of artificial origin, the stone circles are geoglyphs," Sparavignawrote in her email.

The function of the wheels may also have been similar to the enigmatic drawings in the Nazca desert.

 "If we consider, more generally, the stone circles as worship places of ancestors, or places for rituals connected with astronomical events or with seasons, they could have the same function of [the] geoglyphs of South America, the Nazca Lines for instance. The design is different, but the function could be the same," she wrote in her email.

Kennedy said that for now the meaning of the wheels remains a mystery. "The question is what was the purpose?"

[nacho]

Oh! Sexy.

[RottingCorpse]

Not a mystery persay, but in honor of the freak October cold snap/wintry mix barraging the northeast....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

[nacho]

Now I need to dig out my Rasputina CD's...

[RottingCorpse]

So, how many movies about the Lost Colony have been made? This story always scared the crap out of me.

Researchers say they have new clue to Lost Colony

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (AP) — A new look at a 425-year-old map has yielded a tantalizing clue about the fate of the Lost Colony, the settlers who disappeared from North Carolina's Roanoke Island in the late 16th century.

Experts from the First Colony Foundation and the British Museum in London discussed their findings Thursday at a scholarly meeting on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Their focus: the "Virginea Pars" map of Virginia and North Carolina created by explorer John White in the 1580s and owned by the British Museum since 1866.

"We believe that this evidence provides conclusive proof that they moved westward up the Albemarle Sound to the confluence of the Chowan and Roanoke rivers," said James Horn, vice president of research and historical interpretation at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and author of a 2010 book about the Lost Colony.

"Their intention was to create a settlement. And this is what we believe we are looking at with this symbol — their clear intention, marked on the map ..."

Attached to the map are two patches. One patch appears to merely correct a mistake on the map, but the other — in what is modern-day Bertie County in northeastern North Carolina — hides what appears to be a fort. Another symbol, appearing to be the very faint image of a different kind of fort, is drawn on top of the patch.

The American and British scholars believe the fort symbol could indicate where the settlers went. The British researchers joined the Thursday meeting via webcast.

In a joint announcement, the museums said, "First Colony Foundation researchers believe that it could mark, literally and symbolically, 'the way to Jamestown.' As such, it is a unique discovery of the first importance."

White made the map and other drawings when he traveled to Roanoke Island in 1585 on an expedition commanded by Sir Ralph Lane. In 1587, a second colony of 116 English settlers landed on Roanoke Island, led by White. He left the island for England for more supplies but couldn't return again until 1590 because of the war between England and Spain.

When he came back, the colony was gone. White knew the majority had planned to move "50 miles into the maine," as he wrote, referring to the mainland. The only clue he found about the fate of the other two dozen was the word "CROATOAN" carved into a post, leading historians to believe they moved south to live with American Indians on what's now Hatteras Island.

But the discovery of the fort symbol offers the first new clue in centuries about what happened to the 95 or so settlers, experts said Thursday. And researchers at the British Museum discovered it because Brent Lane, a member of the board of the First Colony Foundation, asked a seemingly obvious question: What's under those two patches?

Researchers say the patches attached to White's excruciatingly accurate map were made with ink and paper contemporaneous with the rest of the map. One corrected mistakes on the shoreline of the Pamlico River and the placing of some villages. But the other covered the possible fort symbol, which is visible only when the map is viewed in a light box.

The map was critical to Sir Walter Raleigh's quest to attract investors in his second colony, Lane said. It was critical to his convincing Queen Elizabeth I to let him keep his charter to establish a colony in the New World. It was critical to the colonists who navigated small boats in rough waters.

So that made Lane wonder: "If this was such an accurate map and it was so critical to their mission, why in the world did it have patches on it? This important document was being shown to investors and royalty to document the success of this mission. And it had patches on it like a hand-me-down."

Researchers don't know why someone covered the symbol with a patch, although Horn said the two drawings could indicate the settlers planned to build more of a settlement than just a fort.

The land where archaeologists would need to dig eventually is privately owned, and some of it could be under a golf course and residential community. So excavating won't begin anytime soon. But it doesn't have to, said Nicholas Luccketti, a professional archaeologist in Virginia and North Carolina for more than 35 years.

Archaeologists must first re-examine ceramics, including some recovered from an area in Bertie County called Salmon Creek, he said.

"This clue is certainly the most significant in pointing where a search should continue," Lane said. "The search for the colonists didn't start this decade; it didn't start this century. It started as soon as they were found to be absent from Roanoke Island ... I would say every generation in the last 400 years has taken this search on."

But none have had today's sophisticated technology to help, he said.

"None of them had this clue on this map."

[nacho]

Not quite answering the unanswered, though, eh? Just changes the theorized direction they vanished in...

[nacho]

!!!

FBI: 'Credible lead' surfaces in D.B. Cooper case

SEATTLE (AP) — The FBI says it has a "credible" lead in the D.B. Cooper case involving the 1971 hijacking of a passenger jet over Washington state and the suspect's legendary parachute escape.

The fate and identity of the hijacker dubbed "D.B. Cooper" has remained a mystery in the 40 years since a man jumped from a Northwest Orient Airlines 727 flight with $200,000 in ransom.

The recent tip provided to the FBI came from a law enforcement member who directed investigators to a person who might have helpful information on the suspect, FBI spokeswoman Ayn Sandalo Dietrich told The Seattle Times on Sunday. She called the new information the "most promising lead we have right now," but cautioned that investigators were not on the verge of breaking the case.

"With any lead our first step is to assess how credible it is," Sandalo Dietrich told the Seattle Post Intelligencer on Saturday. "Having this come through another law enforcement (agency), having looked it over when we got it - it seems pretty interesting."

Dietrich says an item belonging to the man was sent to a lab in Quantico, Va., for forensic testing. She did not provide specifics about the item or the man's identity.

Federal investigators have checked more than 1,000 leads since the suspect bailed out on Nov. 24, 1971, over the Pacific Northwest. The man who jumped gave his name as Dan Cooper and claimed shortly after takeoff in Portland, Ore., that he had a bomb, leading the flight crew to land the plane in Seattle, where passengers were exchanged for parachutes and ransom money.

The flight then took off for Mexico with the suspect and flight crew on board before the man parachuted from the plane.

The FBI's recent tip in the case was first reported by The Telegraph newspaper in London.

This turned out to be...more junk on his tie (which they've been studying for 20 years!)!

In November 2011 Kaye announced that particles of pure titanium had also been found on the tie. He explained that titanium, which was much rarer in the 1970s than it is today, was found at that time only in metal fabrication or production facilities, or at chemical companies using it (combined with aluminum) to store extremely corrosive substances.[92] The findings suggested, he said, that Cooper may have been a chemist or a metallurgist, or may have worked in a metal or chemical manufacturing plant

An article I quoted shortly after RC's above -- where a woman said it was her uncle -- has also been updated. The uncle's DNA was not a match.

[nacho]

The Latest Mayday Ad:

This is one that McGraw and Fajwat can waste their day on...

http://www.maydaymystery.org/mayday/

From Wikipedia:

The May Day Mystery refers to a series of cryptic ads which have been placed in the Arizona Daily Wildcat, the newspaper of the University of Arizona, every May 1 since 1981. (In 1983, 1988, 1999 and 2005 the ads technically ran on April 29, April 27, April 29 and April 29, respectively. May 1 fell on a weekend in those years, when the Daily Wildcat does not publish.) The ads have appeared on other dates as well, usually in early December. While the ads at first appear to be an intellectual game, there is an underlying message of political and economic revolution.

The first ad contained three handwritten lines: "SR/CL: RICHMOND", a string of Simplified Chinese characters, and "MAY DAY, 1981". The Chinese characters translate literally as "Chairman Mao ten-thousand years old", which is usually interpreted as "Long live Chairman Mao". [1]

There are a number of recurring themes in the ads, including:

* The Orphanage: A secret society, supposedly behind the ads
* The Prize: An unspecified reward for anyone who "solves" the mystery; in a safe deposit box
* Smiley Guy: A stylized smiley face that appears in some of the ads
* SR/CL: An unknown acronym
* White Rabbit/Wonder Bread: Unknown commodities transported by the Orphanage
* Martin Luther

Bryan Hance, a former student, discovered the ads as an undergraduate and is the first person known to seriously investigate them. He started a website in 1997 to document his investigation, and has attracted a small group of followers. He has been in contact with "The Orphanage" and others (such as "the Pimp") by email, post and phone since 1999. He has received many packages in the mail containing everything from coins and photographs to printouts from websites. He has also received many gold coins and bills, totaling over a few hundred dollars. He has been told that the money can be spent any way he wants, though Bryan tends to use it on paying the server bill.

The ads are placed by Robert Truman Hungerford, an eccentric lawyer who claims to be the legal counsel for the organization. While he refuses to discuss the origin of the ads, he has said that it is possible that he is insane and that the ads are "the ravings of a madman".

The meanings of most of the Mayday Mystery ads are unsolved.

http://www.maydaymystery.org/mayday/texts/09-dec9.html

These are ongoing -- all cataloged (since that original post in 2008) at http://www.maydaymystery.org/mayday/

[nacho]

A claim that they found Earhart:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/south-pacific/4070865/Claims-Amelia-Earharts-plane-found

They found a Lockheed Electra buried in coral.

There's lots of folks who say this is crap, but it backs up a theory by an archeologist in 07 that she went down at roughly the spot where they claim to have found the plane.

We'll find out for sure in a few weeks.

I love going through this thread and doing Unsolved Mysteries updates... No go on the plane, and bone fragments found belonged to...a turtle. Earhart remains a mystery.

[Reginald McGraw]

Nice updates! I'd forgotten about these.

[RottingCorpse]

in another thread, Nacho mentioned mentioned picking my wife up at the airport after the mob whacks me. It reminded me that this was in the news recently.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/01/us/michigan-jimmy-hoffa-search/index.html

Hoffa case: Soil results no guarantee of search's end

Roseville, Michigan (CNN) -- Authorities might find out Tuesday whether a body was buried under a shed in Roseville, Michigan. They just won't know whether it's missing Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa or not.

Two soil samples were taken from a home in the suburban Detroit community of Roseville last week after a tipster claimed he saw a body buried on the property a day after Hoffa disappeared in 1975.

The samples were taken from beneath a storage shed and sent to a lab at Michigan State University for tests to determine the presence of human remains.

The hope had been to get the findings back sometime Monday. But in a press release issued Monday afternoon, Roseville Police Chief James Berlin said he'd been told that, while testing had begun, "the results of those tests will not be available until early (Tuesday) morning."

What police do know is that the samples that were unearthed didn't contain any "discernible remains," such as bones, body parts or other evidence, according to Berlin.

The search of the Roseville property is the latest in an on-again, off-again search for Hoffa, whose disappearance 35 years ago captured the public imagination.

Hoffa, then 62, was last seen on July 30, 1975, outside the Detroit-area Machus Red Fox restaurant. He was there ostensibly to meet with reputed Detroit Mafia street enforcer Anthony Giacalone and Genovese crime family figure Anthony Provenzano, who was also a chief of a Teamsters local in New Jersey. Giacalone died in 1982; Provenzano died in 1988 in prison.

The tipster, a former gambler, once did business with a man tied to Giacalone, said Dan Moldea, author of "The Hoffa Wars." Moldea said he first spoke to the tipster in March and then sent him to police.

Vanished Hoffa still fascinates after almost 40 years

Despite those links, Moldea said it seems unlikely that anyone would have been buried at the site, in full view of the neighborhood. And if a body had been buried there, little would remain, he said.

The lab tests being conducted on the soil samples will be able to determine if human remains were buried at the site, but will not identify them, Berlin said. If human remains are discovered, investigators would have to return for a more complete excavation, he said.

Even so, Berlin doubts any possible human remains discovered at the house would be those of Hoffa.

"It would be great if it was, because I would like to bring closure to his family and the tens of thousands of Teamsters that idolize this man, and just the southeast of Michigan," Berlin said.

"This is kind of like an open wound that won't go away. Every couple of years this happens, and all you guys come out here and we have to relive it."

But Berlin said the "time line doesn't really add up."

Hoffa was of the most powerful union leaders at a time when unions wielded enormous political sway. He was forced out of the organized labor movement when he went to federal prison in 1967 for jury tampering and fraud.

President Richard Nixon pardoned him in 1971 on condition he not attempt to get back into the union movement before 1980.

Hoffa believed Giacalone had set up the meeting to help settle a feud between Hoffa and Provenzano, but Hoffa was the only one who showed up for the meeting, according to the FBI. Giacalone and Provenzano later told the FBI that no meeting had been scheduled.

The FBI said at the time that the disappearance could have been linked to Hoffa's efforts to regain power in the Teamsters and the mob's influence over the union's pension funds.

Police and the FBI have searched for Hoffa intermittently.

In September 2001, the FBI found DNA that linked Hoffa to a car that agents suspected was used in his disappearance.

In 2004, authorities removed floorboards from a Detroit home to look for traces of blood, as former Teamsters official Frank Sheeran claimed in a biography that he had shot Hoffa. Sheeran died in 2003.

Two years later, the FBI razed a horse barn in Michigan following what it called "a fairly credible lead."

Urban lore long suggested that Hoffa was buried around the end zone at the former Giants Stadium in New Jersey.

[nacho]

Yeah...been idly following this. Results today!

[nacho]

Just needed some free construction work, I guess... (This is no surprise.)

Soil tests indicate that no human remains are buried beneath a shed in Roseville, Mich., where authorities were investigating the possibility that the late Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa might have been buried, officials said.

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/02/14183689-no-human-remains-found-at-michigan-site-of-jimmy-hoffa-tests

[nacho]

How come I've never heard of the "Band of Holes" before?


http://www.world-mysteries.com/mpl_piscovalley.htm