History's Mysteries

[RottingCorpse]

Recent history, but history nonetheless.

Long Lost Beagle Probe Finally Found On Mars

http://www.iflscience.com/space/missing-12-years-long-lost-beagle-probe-finally-found-mars

[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.

So someone got me Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper off of my wishlist.

It's probably less about Cooper and more about Cooper's world, and the people who have chased him all this time. Every goddamned page is a Wiki hole... We open up with a fascinating history of the Stewardess. How a series of crashes in 1969-71 led to the development of the "sexy Stewardess," complete with boot camp schools and outlandish regulation. Stews had to weight in once a month and, if they put on too much weight, they were put on unpaid probation until they lost weight. For Northwest, they were forced to wear wigs and slinky uniforms. For Southwest, they had stripper-style zip-away uniforms that they would strip out of in front of passengers -- greeting to dinner service to cocktail hour...

The airlines all openly said that the idea was to distract the passenger, to provide something to alleviate fears of flying. A Northwest ad campaign was "Fly me!" with stuff like -- "I'm Cheryl -- fly me!" "We're you're cabin crew, and you can fly us like you've never flown before."

The life of the stewardess, though, is horrifically empty and lonely. No unions, and no controls. They're preyed upon, they're slaves to the airline, they're servants. The airline would post spotters on flights to make sure the stews were being sexy enough and looked good enough... You never knew if a spotter from corporate was there evaluating the size of your hips, the width of your smile, the amount of cleavage...

Into all this walks D.B. Cooper. A genteel man who, in the space of an hour, creates a bizarre sort of Stockholm Syndrome with flight crew and passengers alike that persists today. And out he goes again, down the aftstairs and into legend.

And for 40 years, the people chasing him become increasingly obsessed and insane. It's total madness. And an amazing story.

[nacho]

I don't think I've talked about the Amber Room in this thread... It's one of my favorite lost art mysteries.

The Amber Room was built in 1701 and given to Peter the Great as a gift in 1716. Peter's daughter upgraded it and changed it around -- eventually commissioning ten years worth of labor and over 13,000 pounds of amber. The room itself is nearly 600 square feet.

The room was lit by about 500 candles and the amber would pick up the light, so the entire place glowed with a fiery gold hue that's, supposedly, the most amazing thing ever or whatever.

The room is pretty much priceless... The raw value of the amber comes to about $250 million, but you'd have to be insane to cannibalize the amber room if you found it. But, perhaps, something like that happened. In 2011, in Russia, $30 million of amber was found walled into a cellar, and the amber appeared to be (inconclusively) from the Amber Room.

In 1941, as the Germans closed in, attempts to disassemble the Amber Room resulted in some extensive damage (which probably explains that 2011 cache). The Soviets decided to cover it up instead. This fell through since the Germans had their own Monuments Men and knew exactly where to go... These experts then successfully disassembled the room and shipped it home where, from 1941 till the end of the war, it was on display at Konigsberg Castle.

Here we get into the mystery... Hitler ordered the room disassembled and hidden. Erich Koch, one of Hitler's chief civilian administrators, was in charge...but in 1945, he had other plans. He was cashing out and skipping town. Eventually arrested by the Brits in 1949, the Soviets demanded that he be extradited for trial. Sentenced to death, he successfully bargained to have the sentence commuted to life in prison by promising to reveal the location of looted art. Along with the recovery of several items, he promised that he knew the location of the Amber Room -- it was on a U-Boat that had been sunk shortly before the end of the war, destination top secret (this is part of the origin myth behind the Antarctic Base conspiracy theory).

It took till the 60s for technology to catch up with the requirements to make a dive for the U-Boat...and nothing was found. By then, Koch's deal had paid off and he clammed up. No more talk, just leave me alone. Though he did tell an interrogator in 1965 and, again, in 1967 that the Room was in a bunker in Konigsberg, and generally blamed everything on Himmler and played dumb as to the location.

So back to 1945. Koch gets the order to dissemble and hide the Amber Room. The details of the order are unknown, but it WAS issued. Surviving records indicate that Koch ignored Hitler and took off, leaving the Room to be destroyed by Allied bombers along with the castle museum where it was on display. A study of the ruins for amber was inconclusive, but the Soviets wouldn't let anyone near it. They sealed off the castle, claimed that they found nothing, and Brezhnev personally ordered that the castle's ruins be destroyed utterly and paved over in 1965.

So, the conspiracy theories:

1) It did make it onto a U-boat
2) It's in a bunker somewhere beneath Konigsberg
3) The Soviets recovered it but used its alleged loss as political leverage

So...the article below is the latest in this saga, pursuing the bunker theory.

A pensioner has started digging in Germany's western Ruhr region for the Amber Room, a priceless work of art looted by Nazis from the Soviet Union during World War Two and missing for 70 years, but says he needs a new drill to help him.

Dubbed the Eighth Wonder of the World, the Amber Room was an ornate chamber made of amber panels given to Czar Peter the Great by Prussia's Friedrich Wilhelm I in 1716.

German troops stole the treasure chamber from a palace near St Petersburg in 1941 and took it to Koenigsberg, now the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, before it disappeared.

Conspiracy theories abound about the whereabouts of what some say is the world's most valuable piece of lost art. Some historians think it was destroyed in the war, others say Germans smuggled it to safety.

Now 68-year-old pensioner Karl-Heinz Kleine says he thinks the chamber is hidden under the town of Wuppertal, deep in western Germany's industrial Ruhr area.

After analyzing the evidence, Kleine has concluded that Erich Koch, who was the Nazis' chief administrator in East Prussia, may have secretly dispatched it to his home town.

"Wuppertal has a large number of tunnels and bunkers which have not yet been searched for the Amber Room. We have started looking in possible hiding places here," Kleine said.

"But the search is very costly. We need helpers, special equipment and money," Kleine told Reuters, adding that a building firm which had lent him a drill had asked for it back.

"I only have a small pension, a new machine is too expensive for me. But whoever helps will get his share of the Amber Room when we find it," he told Reuters.

"I am optimistic. I just need the tools, then it could go quickly," he said.

Even Communist East Germany's loathed Stasi secret police tried and failed to find the Amber Room. Hobby treasure hunters have launched expensive searches for it across Germany, from lake bottoms to mines in the eastern Ore Mountains. But in vain.

Historians say Erich Koch, convicted of war crimes by a Polish court, amassed a hoard of looted art and had it transported west from Koenigsberg in the final months of the war as the Soviet forces drew closer.

Russian craftsmen, helped by German funds, have recreated a replica of the Amber Room at the Catherine Palace from where the original was stolen.

[Reginald McGraw]

https://xkcd.com/1501/

[nacho]

I agree!

[nacho]

Recently released footage of Amelia before she was kidnapped by aliens:

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/found-footage-of-amelia-earhart-just-before-her-last-flight

[nacho]

News worth following! Uncovering the "hidden" (faded, worn) text on the map that influenced Columbus:

http://www.wired.com/2014/09/martellus-map/

Results later this year. Hopefully it'll say something interesting beyond "dunno what's here, homes."

http://phys.org/news/2015-06-hidden-secrets-world-revealed-multispectral.html


I love how the results are all largely stating the obvious (from our perspective). Yeah, there are like lions here or some shit. And there are crazy natives here.

[RottingCorpse]

The headline is far sexier than the actual information, but this piece is still pretty interesting.

http://www.history.com/news/archaeologists-find-new-clues-to-lost-colony-mystery

Archaeologists Find New Clues to “Lost Colony” Mystery

In 1587, Englishman John White led more than 100 men, women and children in the first attempt to found a permanent English colony in the New World. The group settled on Roanoke Island, one of a chain of barrier islands now known as the Outer Banks, off the coast of North Carolina. Later that year, White headed back to England to bring more supplies, but England’s naval war with Spain would delay his return for nearly three years. When he finally arrived on Roanoke Island, on August 18, 1590, White found the colony abandoned and looted, with no trace of the settlers. Only two clues remained: The word “Croatoan” had been carved on a post and the letters “CRO” scratched into a tree trunk. Now, two separate teams of archaeologists say they have uncovered new evidence suggesting what may have happened to the inhabitants of the famed “Lost Colony.”

When John White, appointed by Sir Walter Raleigh as governor of Roanoke Colony, returned to England for more supplies in late 1587, he left behind his wife, his daughter and his infant granddaughter—Virginia Dare, the first child born in the New World to English parents—among the other settlers. Upon White’s return in 1590, he found no trace of his family or the other inhabitants of the abandoned colony. Over the centuries to come, archaeologists, historians and explorers would delve into the mystery of the “Lost Colony” of Roanoke, all failing to find definitive answers.

Based on the scant clues left behind, some speculated that Native Americans attacked and killed the English colonists. “Croatoan” was the name of an island south of Roanoke, now Hatteras Island, which at the time was home to a Native American tribe of the same name. Alternatively, they might have tried to sail back to England on their own and been lost at sea, or been killed by hostile Spaniards who came north from their own settlements in Florida. One enduring theory was that the settlers might have been absorbed into friendly Native American tribes, perhaps after moving further inland into what is now North Carolina.

Now, two independent teams have found archaeological remains suggesting that at least some of the Roanoke colonists might have survived and split into two groups, each of which assimilated itself into a different Native American community. One team is excavating a site near Cape Creek on Hatteras Island, around 50 miles (80 kilometers) southeast of the Roanoke Island settlement, while the other is based on the mainland about 50 miles to the northwest of the Roanoke site.

Cape Creek, located in a live oak forest near Pamlico Sound, was the site of a major Croatoan town center and trading hub. In 1998, archaeologists from East Carolina University stumbled upon a unique find from early British America: a 10-carat gold signet ring engraved with a lion or horse, believed to date to the 16th century. The ring’s discovery prompted later excavations at the site led by Mark Horton, an archaeologist at Britain’s Bristol University, who has been directing volunteers with the Croatoan Archaeological Society in annual digs since 2009. Recently, Horton’s team found a small piece of slate that seems to have been used as a writing tablet and part of the hilt of an iron rapier, a light sword similar to those used in England in the late 16th century, along with other artifacts of European and Native American origin. The slate, a smaller version of a similar one found at Jamestown, bears a small letter “M” still barely visible in one corner; it was found alongside a lead pencil.

In addition to these intriguing objects, the Cape Creek site yielded an iron bar and a large copper ingot (or block), both found buried in layers of earth that appear to date to the late 1500s. Native Americans lacked such metallurgical technology, so they are believed to be European in origin. Horton told National Geographic that some of the artifacts his team found are trade items, but it appears that others may well have belonged to the Roanoke colonists themselves: “The evidence is that they assimilated with the Native Americans but kept their goods.”

A watercolor map drawn by none other than John White inspired the search at Site X (as it’s known), located on Albemarle Sound near Edenton, North Carolina, some 50 miles inland. Known as La Virginea Pars, the map shows the East Coast of North America from Chesapeake Bay to Cape Lookout; it is housed at the British Museum as part of its permanent collection. White began drawing the map in 1585, two years before he became governor. In 2012, researchers using X-ray spectroscopy and other imaging techniques spotted a tiny four-pointed star, colored red and blue, concealed under a patch of paper that White used to make corrections to his map. It was thought to mark the location of a site some 50 miles inland, which White alluded to in testimony given after his attempted return to the colony. If such a site did exist, the theory went, it would have been a reasonable destination for the displaced Roanoke settlers.

According to archaeologist Nicholas Luccketti of the First Colony Foundation, which is conducting the excavations at Site X, the group has found shards of pottery that they claim may have been used by Roanoke settlers after they left the colony. Located nearby is a site that archaeologists believe might have been a small Native American town, Mettaquem. After the Roanoke colony met its end, English settlers eventually came south from Virginia into North Carolina, but the first recorded settler in the area did not arrive until about 1655. But the recently uncovered pottery is in a style called Border Ware, which is typical of the pottery dug up on Roanoke Island, as well as at Jamestown, but was no longer imported to the New World after the early 17th century, when the Virginia Company dissolved.

In addition to the Border Ware pottery, archaeologists at Site X discovered various other items, including a food-storage jar known as a baluster, pieces of early gun flintlocks, a metal hook of the sort used to stretch animal hides or tents and an aglet, a small copper tube used to secure wool fibers before the advent of the hook and eye in the 17th century. Based on his team’s findings, Luccketti thinks the Roanoke colonists may have moved inland to live with Native American allies sometime after White left, and these artifacts might have been among their belongings. As reported in the New York Times, the First Colony Foundation will reveal more about its findings and theory this week in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Though the newly announced discoveries don’t solve this lingering historical mystery, they do point away from Roanoke Island itself, where researchers have failed to come up with evidence pointing to the Lost Colony’s fate. Archaeologists on both teams are hoping that a detailed study of their new finds will yield more clues, and—of course—that more evidence remains, waiting to be discovered, in the endless layers of dirt that surround them.

[nacho]

Man, I saved a few in-depth articles on that in my Feedly and meant to post them here... But my daytime computer life has been so limited.

I'm a sucker for this kind of stuff, so it is as sexy as the headline! But, then, I'm the guy who watches three hour history channel specials about people who can't speak English whose job it is to explore the circa 70AD sewer grates in the Colosseum.

[nacho]

This qualifies for, like, a dozen threads...but I figured I'd put it here because I love this thread most of all! Joe Hill has a theory about a cold case. A blurb and links below... All a wormhole!

Author Joe Hill knows a thing or two about horror and mystery—after all, his dad is famed horror writer Stephen King. So when he comes up with a new theory about an unsolved murder, people listen.

The Lady Of The Dunes is a cold case from July 1974, when two girls found the body of a nearly decapitated woman on the side of the road. Her murderer tried many tactics to hide her identity—removing her teeth and hands, for example. After many attempts to reconstruct the woman’s features, she is still unidentified and the murderer was never caught.

http://www.avclub.com/article/jaws-extra-victim-unsolved-murder-case-224799?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=feeds
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_of_the_Dunes

[Reginald McGraw]

Facinating...

[RottingCorpse]

The Queen Anne's Revenge confirmed...

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/08/110829-blackbeard-shipwreck-pirates-archaeology-science/

Blackbeard's Ship Confirmed off North Carolina

After 15 years of uncertainty, a shipwreck off the coast of North Carolina has been confirmed as that of the infamous 18th-century pirate Blackbeard, state officials say.

The Queen Anne's Revenge grounded on a sandbar near Beaufort (see map) in 1718, nine years after the town had been established. Blackbeard and his crew abandoned the ship and survived.

Until recently, the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources emphasized that the wreck, discovered in 1995, was "thought to be" the Queen Anne's Revenge.

Now, after a comprehensive review of the evidence, those same officials are sure it's the ship sailed by one of history's fiercest and most colorful pirates.

"There was not one aha moment," said Claire Aubel, public relations coordinator for the North Carolina Maritime Museums. "There was a collection of moments and a deduction based on the evidence."

There were two main reasons for the team's certainty, Aubel said: the sheer size of the wreck and the many weapons that were found in the rubble.

No other ship as big as the Queen Anne's Revenge was known to have been in the area at the time, and a pirate ship would have been well armed, she said.

Shipwreck Loot Points to Blackbeard

Blackbeard achieved his infamous immortality in only a few years, operating in the Caribbean Sea and off the coast of colonial America before being killed in a battle with British ships in North Carolina's Pamlico Sound in 1718. (Also see "Grim Life Cursed Real Pirates of Caribbean.")

Some historians have speculated that he deliberately ran the Queen Anne's Revenge aground so that he could keep the most valuable plunder for himself.

Such loot has helped archaeologists link the wreck to Blackbeard since excavations started in 1997. Among the major recovered artifacts are:

—Apothecary weights stamped with tiny fleurs-de-lis, royal symbols of 18th-century France. Queen Anne's Revenge was actually a former French ship, Le Concorde, captured by Blackbeard in 1717. He forced Le Concorde's surgeon to join the pirate crew, and a surgeon at that time likely would have had apothecary weights.

—A small amount of gold found among lead shot. Archaeologists think a French crewman might have hidden the gold in a barrel of shot to conceal it from Blackbeard's pirates.

—A bell engraved with the date 1705.

ID of Blackbeard's Ship Never Really in Doubt

The disclaimer about the wreck's identity was more an acknowledgement of the strict code of scientific scrutiny than the result of any serious doubts about the ship's identity, said Erik Goldstein, curator of arts and numismatics—the study of coins and tokens—for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in Virginia. Archaeologists working on the wreck were always sure of its identity.

State officials "were just being safe," Goldstein said. "At the beginning phase of an excavation, unless you find something like a ship's bell with the name engraved on it, it takes a little while to put the pieces together and gather documentary evidence. It was good, responsible behavior on the part of those folks."

There were two reasons for dropping the official doubt about the identity of the shipwreck, added David Moore, curator of nautical archaeology at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort.

First, the museum recently opened "Blackbeard's Queen Anne's Revenge," a greatly expanded exhibit of artifacts from the shipwreck. Had the confirmation of the ship's identity not been made, curators would have had to title the exhibition something like "Artifacts From the Purported Queen Anne's Revenge," Moore said.

Also, removing the official caveat could help the museum secure private funding to continue excavating the wreck, Moore said. Although the state legislature provides some funding, he said, tight budgets are cutting into that money.

[nacho]

So History channel did a whole thing that "blew open" the DB Cooper case. I watched it. The first two hours were The Story So Far, and the next two hours were all conjecture and Al Capone's vault BS.

The premiere of the show, and the fact that the FBI gets pretty razzed throughout the whole four hours, may have led to this:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/fbi-closes-b-cooper-case-lack-credible-leads-article-1.2707826

The FBI has closed the book on one of the greatest riddles of all time.

The lone agent assigned to the D.B. Cooper manhunt was assigned to other mysteries within the federal agency on Friday, effectively shuttering the 45-year-old case after the FBI — and troves of tipsters — failed to identity the infamous hijacker, the FBI announced.

“Unfortunately, none of the well-meaning tips or applications of new investigative technology have yielded the necessary proof,” FBI spokeswoman Ayn Dietrich-Williams said in a statement late Monday.

[RottingCorpse]

So, have they made any interesting DB Cooper movies?

[nacho]

So, have they made any interesting DB Cooper movies?

If you can find it, The Pursuit of DB Cooper is a 1980 film that stars Robert Duvall and Treat Williams. It's not a good movie, but Duvall and Williams really bring it.

Everything else is shit.