Top 13 Most Creepy And Mysterious Mysteries That Have Finally Been Explained

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Certain mysteries are mysteries no more. Thanks to scientific tools that perhaps didn't exist at the time of the occurrences, investigators have been able to figure out the solutions to many earlier puzzles. Sometimes the researchers simply get lucky, thanks to a deathbed confession or stumbling across a clue that everyone else missed.

Yet, in some cases, people don't believe the proof, particularly if it is a disappointingly simple explanation, lacking a dash of exotica. Books and TV shows may still look for clues to a "mystery" that really isn't there.

Top 13 Most Creepy And Mysterious Places That Have Finally Been Explained

1. The Bermuda Triangle

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Where is Bermuda Triangle?

Bermuda triangle, also known as the Devil’s Triangle, happens to be one of the most mysterious places on this planet. Located off the southeastern coast of the US in the Atlantic Ocean, between Bermuda, Florida and Puerto Rico, the region has become the Centre of unresolved mysteries.

Covering an area of 440,000 miles of sea, the Bermuda triangle is part of a busy shipping route, with several vessels heading to America, Europe and the Caribbean crossing through every day.

What are Bermuda Triangle’s creepy mysteries?

Over the centuries, many ships and planes have been reported to have mysteriously disappeared in the region.

Also, this Devil’s Triangle has been blamed for the disappearance of thousands of people in the past decades.

The stories around the Bermuda triangle begin in Christopher Columbus’s time when he reportedly saw a flame of fire crashing into the sea in the triangle during his first voyage to the New World.

However, the mysterious behaviour of the region came to the public attention only in the 20th century when the Navy cargo ship, USS Cyclops, with more than 300 people on board, went missing in the Bermuda triangle. The latest incident in the region is the disappearance of a small twin-engine plane in May this year.

With four people on board, the plane suddenly disappeared from the radar when it was flying from Puerto Rico to Florida, and the debris from the missing plane was found later.

The recent incident that involved a ship was the sinking of a cargo vessel in the Bermuda Triangle during a deadly hurricane in October 2015.

As the accidents, often mysterious, continue to happen in the Bermuda Triangle region, many have offered a number of explanations for the mystery behind them.

What has been explained about the ship and people’s appearance?

According to Kruszelnicki, disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle aren't uncommon because it's a bustling stretch of sea (he points to its proximity to the United States).

In 2017, Kruszelnicki told news.com.au: "It is close to the Equator, near a wealthy part of the world – America - therefore you have a lot of traffic.According to Lloyd’s of London and the US Coastguard, the number of people that go missing in the Bermuda Triangle is the same as anywhere in the world on a percentage basis."

Kruszelnicki also addressed Flight 19, the most well-known of the triangle's disappearances.

Flight 19 was a five-plane flight that took off from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on December 5, 1945, with 14 crew members on board.

The TBM Avenger torpedo bombers of the US Navy were on a two-hour normal training flight when they lost communication with the base. The planes vanished, along with their crews, and no debris was ever discovered.

A PBM-Mariner seaplane despatched on a search-and-rescue mission to locate Flight 19 also vanished, according to allegations, as did the 13 crew men onboard.

An Australian scientist has dared to declare that the Bermuda Triangle enigma has been'solved' - by asserting that there was never a mystery in the first place, defying 70 years of fevered conjecture.

The disappearance of so many ships and planes in the area between Bermuda, Florida, and Puerto Rico, according to Karl Kruszelnicki, a fellow at Sydney University, has nothing to do with aliens or fire-crystals from the lost city of Atlantis.

Instead, the large number of disappearances is explained by nothing more supernatural than plain old human error, bad weather, and the fact that many planes and ships approach that part of the Atlantic Ocean in the first place.

2. Disapperance of Amelia Earhart

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How did Amelia disappear?

On the morning of July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, took off from Lae, New Guinea, on one of the last legs in their historic attempt to circumnavigate the globe. Their next destination was Howland Island in the central Pacific Ocean, some 2,500 miles away. A U.S. Coast Guard cutter, the Itasca, waited there to guide the world-famous aviator in for a landing on the tiny, uninhabited coral atoll.

But Earhart never arrived on Howland Island. Battling overcast skies, faulty radio transmissions and a rapidly diminishing fuel supply in her twin-engine Lockheed Electra plane, she and Noonan lost contact with the Itasca somewhere over the Pacific. Despite a search-and-rescue mission of unprecedented scale, including ships and planes from the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard scouring some 250,000 square miles of ocean, they were never found.

In its official report at the time, the Navy concluded that Earhart and Noonan had run out of fuel, crashed into the Pacific and drowned. A court order declared Earhart legally dead in January 1939, 18 months after she disappeared. From the beginning, however, debate has raged over what actually happened on July 2, 1937 and afterward. Several alternate theories have surfaced, and many millions of dollars have been spent searching for evidence that would reveal the truth of Earhart’s fate.

Theories about her disappearance

Theory 1: Open-Ocean Crash Near Destination

The official U.S. position is that Earhart and Noonan ran out of fuel on the way to Howland Island and crashed in the Pacific Ocean.

The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca was at Howland to assist Earhart in this pre-radar era by providing radio bearings and a smoke plume, but owing to radio problems, communication was sporadic and broken. According to the Itasca's radio logs, Earhart indicated she must be near the island but couldn't see it and was running low on gas. The Electra never made it to the island.

About 15 years ago Nauticos—a Hanover, Maryland, company that performs deep-ocean searches and other ocean-research services—led an effort to locate Earhart's plane where they believe it crashed: in the Pacific Ocean in the vicinity of Howland Island.

Nauticos president David Jourdan said in 2003 that, by studying factors such as Earhart's broken-up radio transmissions and what is known about the Electra's fuel supply, he and his colleagues had narrowed down an area of the ocean that they believe will eventually yield the plane's grave.

"We are confident it is in the area we are searching," said Jourdan. "Of course, we cannot guarantee it, because it could be on the outside edge, but we are sure it is in the vicinity."

In March and April of 2002, the company used a high-tech, deep-sea sonar system to search 630 square miles (1,630 square kilometers) of the ocean floor near Howland. They didn't find the plane on that expedition or a 2006 follow-up mission.

Later, in 2009, a team organized by the Waitt Institute for Discovery searched a roughly Delaware-size area just west of Howland with the help of deep-sea robots.

Though the expedition turned up no clues, an optimistic Ted Waitt, the institute's president, said in a statement that its results “eliminate thousands of square miles from future search efforts." (Waitt collaborates on a series of grants with the National Geographic Society, which owns a 27-percent stake in National Geographic Partners, this media organization.)

Theory 2: Nikumaroro Castaway

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) is investigating the hypothesis that Earhart and Noonan landed their Lockheed Electra 10E on Nikumaroro Island, a speck of land 350 nautical miles southwest of Howland, when they couldn’t find Howland.

The researchers base their hypothesis on Earhart’s last radio transmissions. At 8:43 a.m. on July 2, Earhart radioed the Itasca: "KHAQQ [the Electra's call letters] to Itasca. We are on the line 157 337." The Itasca received the transmission but couldn't get any bearings on the signal.

The “line 157 337” indicates that the plane was flying on a northwest to southeast navigational line that bisected Howland Island. If Earhart and Noonan missed Howland, they would fly either northwest or southeast on the line to find it. To the northwest of Howland lies open ocean for thousands of miles; to the southwest is Nikumaroro.

The line-of-position radio message was the last confirmed transmission from Earhart, but radio operators received 121 messages over the next 10 days. Of those, at least 57 could have been from the Electra. Wireless stations took direction bearings on six of them.

“Four crossed near the Phoenix Islands,” said Tom King, TIGHAR’s senior archaeologist, in a previous interview. “Most messages were at night when the tide was low.”

At the time of Earhart’s disappearance, the tide on Nikumaroro was especially low, revealing a reef surface along the shore long and flat enough for a plane to land. If Earhart sent any of those 57 radio transmissions, the plane must have landed relatively intact.

The TIGHAR researchers theorize that Earhart and Noonan radioed at night to avoid the searing daytime heat inside the aluminum plane. Eventually the tide lifted the Electra off the reef, and it sank or broke up in the surf. The transmissions stopped on July 13, 1937.

Other evidence points to Earhart and Noonan’s fate as castaways on Nikumaroro. Later in 1937, a British party explored the island with the intent of colonizing it. Eric Bevington, a colonial officer, noticed what looked like an “overnight bivouac.” He also took a photograph of the shoreline, which includes an unidentified object that TIGHAR speculates might be a plane’s landing gear.

By 1938 the island was colonized as part of the Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme, one of the British Empire’s last expansions. Colonists reported finding airplane parts, some of which could have plausibly come from the Electra.

In 1940 Gerald Gallagher, the colonial administrator, discovered 13 bones buried near the remains of a campfire. He also found the remnants of two shoes—a man’s and a woman’s—as well as a box that once held a sextant, a navigation device. The bones were shipped to Fiji, measured, and subsequently lost. TIGHAR researchers evaluated the measurements using modern techniques and determined the bones could be from a woman of Earhart’s size and build.

TIGHAR has launched 12 expeditions to Nikumaroro since 1989. Over the course of those visits to the island, they’ve identified a site that matches Gallagher’s description of where the bones were found.

At the Seven Site—the name comes from the shape of the clearing around it—there’s evidence of several campfires, as well as the remains of birds, fish, turtles, and clams, indicating that someone ate there. Based on the way the clams were opened and the fish consumed (the heads weren’t eaten), that someone was probably not a Pacific islander.

Several 1930s-era glass bottles have also been discovered at the site. One of them may even have contained freckle cream, a cosmetic Earhart was likely to have used.

A TIGHAR expedition is currently underway at Nikumaroro, deploying four dogs that specialize in sniffing out human remains as deep as nine feet underground and as old as 1,500 years. “No other technology is more sophisticated than the dogs,” says Fred Hiebert, archaeologist in residence at the National Geographic Society, which is sponsoring the canines. “They have a higher rate of success identifying things than ground-penetrating radar.”

Theory 3: The Marshall Islands Conspiracy

A third theory is that Earhart and Noonan, unable—or perhaps not intending—to find Howland, headed north to the Japanese-controlled Marshall Islands (map), where they were taken hostage by the Japanese, possibly as U.S. spies.

Some believe both pilots were eventually killed, while others believe Earhart and maybe Noonan returned to the U.S. under assumed names. According to one theory, Earhart took the name Irene Craigmile, then married Guy Bolam and became Irene Bolam, who died in New Jersey in 1982.

"If she couldn't find Howland, Plan B was to cut off communications and head for the Marshall Islands and ditch her airplane there," Rollin C. Reineck, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel who lives in Kailua, Hawaii, claimed in 2003.

Reineck’s book Amelia Earhart Survived describes a scenario in which Earhart ditched her plane in the Marshall Islands and returned to the U.S. under an assumed name for national security reasons.

According to Reineck, the scheme would have allowed the U.S. government to rescue Earhart in the Marshall Islands and at the same time perform prewar reconnaissance on the Japanese. "However, the plan went bad, as a lot of plans do," said Reineck. Earhart radioed that she was headed north, the message was intercepted, and the Japanese took her hostage, he claims.

In recent years, high school science teacher and Earhart enthusiast Dick Spink has picked up Reineck’s torch, collecting oral histories from the Marshall Islands he says are proof that Earhart and Noonan landed on a tiny atoll named Mili.

“The world needs to know this,” Spink said in a 2015 interview. “I heard a consistent story from too many people in the Marshalls to dismiss it. They say, ‘She landed at Mili. Our uncles and aunts, our parents, and our grandparents know she landed here.’ ”

The Marshallese accounts were so convincing that Spink has spent $50,000 of his own money searching for the spot where Earhart landed. He contends that the islanders’ stories will be borne out by scientific proof. (Read more about Spink’s theory on the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.)

READ MORE: Facts about Planet Nine -Mystery of an Unknown Planet that holds great meanings

3. Death Valley's Moving Rocks

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Mystery:

Racetrack Playa is home to one of Death Valley's most enduring mysteries. Littered across the flat surface of this dry lake, also called a "playa," are hundreds of rocks that seem to have been dragged across the ground. Sometimes these rocks—some weighing as much as 320 kilograms (700 pounds)—leave synchronized trails that can stretch for hundreds of meters. The rocks may sit for years without moving.

Mystery solved:

Researchers just recently found out. Remote observations from 2011 to 2013 showed it's a rare combination of water, ice, and wind.

In August 2014, a group of (very patient) researchers aided by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, NASA and others announced they had solved the mystery. In a statement, Richard D. Norris and his cousin James M. Norris said that the rock movements occurred during a rare combination of conditions in winter. There had to be a shallow layer of water in the dry lake bed and nighttime temperatures cold enough for the formation of a thin layer of ice. On sunny days, melting caused the ice to break into large floating panels that, driven by light winds, pushed against the rocks to move them, leaving tracks on the desert floor. The editor- and peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE published their study.

The two cousins launched their investigation of sailing stones in 2011. That’s when they founded what they called the Slithering Stones Research Initiative. They established a weather station near Racetrack Playa and added 15 of their own stones to the playa. The added stones had GPS tracking units attached.

Then, they watched. On December 4 and December 20, 2013, their setup – which used time-lapse photography – caught on camera rocks that were sliding across the playa at up to 15 feet (3-5 meters) per minute. They saw many other instances of sailing stones as well, becoming the first people in the world to see the stones in motion.

4. The Mary Celeste

Photo wikipedia

For more than 100 years the story of the Mary Celeste has baffled people. After the ship failed to arrive at port, search parties went to find it, and discovered it completely empty, with no sign of a struggle. But why would a crew abandon a seemingly fine ship, what could possibly convince them to do this?

On December 4, 1872, a crew sailing for Gibraltar found an unassuming merchant vessel adrift off the coast of the Azores. It was devoid of life.

The Mary Celeste’s cargo and supplies were relatively undisturbed. The former occupants’ belongings were present, the sails were furled, and the lifeboat was gone. With little evidence of chaos, there wasn’t much to go on. The sailors took the Mary Celeste to Gibraltar for further investigation. Soon after, it became the subject of conspiracy theories, rumors, and lies.

The Mary Celeste was not an extraordinary ship. It was an average brigantine, refitted from the wreck of its predecessor, the Amazon. After a couple of days of bad weather, the vessel left New York with seven crew members. It was captained by Benjamin Spooner Briggs, an experienced, well-respected sailor. His wife and two-year-old daughter were also on board. They were traveling to Genoa with over 1,700 barrels of denatured alcohol.

Historians assume that all was well until the ship’s final log entry at 5 am on November 25. What took place between then and the Mary Celeste’s discovery by the crew of the Dei Gratia, which was eight days behind them, was a mystery.

What are plausible theories?

A giant octopus, a sea monster, pirates and even the (not remotely nearby) Bermuda Triangle have been mooted as theories for why the people on the Mary Celeste abandoned ship.

There are currently two scenarios with a measure of scientific backing. Both offer reasons for why an experienced captain might have abandoned ship. A UCL study in 2006 concluded that an explosion caused by fumes from the leaking alcohol barrels could have been loud enough to do so without causing significant damage to the ship itself or leaving discernable traces of the blast.

Meanwhile, in 2007, a study supported by The Smithsonian pointed to the water flooding the hold and the dismantled pump as the best clues. They posited that Captain Briggs, possibly lost and in rough seas, believed the ship was taking on too much water, thus rushing everyone onto the lifeboat.

Other theories focus on the ship itself. Perhaps faulty equipment caused the crew to abandon the ship? Maybe the captain overestimated the volume of water in the hold, which turned out to be only 1.1m deep. In these scenarios, the Mary Celeste’s crew would have taken the lifeboat to escape. However, this does not explain the fate of the 10 passengers. The lifeboat was never found.

5. The Easter Island Statues

Easter Island is one of the remotest inhabited islands in the world, more than 1,600 miles away from the nearest town. Ever since the first explorers visited the place, it has stood out for one main reason- the 887 Moai, giant statues of heads that are placed around the coast.

What are the moai—and who built them?

At latest count on the island, there are 1,043 complete moai, enormous statues with prominent heads made from volcanic stone. Contrary to popular belief, they aren’t just heads—they have torsos too, though many are partially or completely buried. On average, they reach 13 feet in height and weigh 10 metric tons.

Most of the statues stand with their backs to the sea on stone platforms called ahu, which hold up to 15 statues. Some moai are adorned with cylindrical red stones called pukao on their heads, which represents a topknot of hair.

But the true number of moai on the island is unknown because many remain buried in the Rano Raraku quarry on the island’s south shore, where the statues were built. The largest discovered moai, named “El Gigante,” is one that never made it out of Rano Raraku—it is 69 feet tall and is thought to weigh about 200 metric tons.

These statues were erected hundreds of years before the first European arrived on the island on Easter Sunday 1722. Van Tilburg believes Polynesians discovered the island around A.D. 1000, and developed advanced social, political, and religious systems that produced the noble moai.

Photo smithsonian

Mystery about its location

Researchers have long puzzled over why the huge statues were placed where they are. However, a new study says the people of Rapa Nui, as the island is called in the local language, positioned them near sources of humanity's most vital resource: fresh water.

Archaeologists studied the location of the statues, or moai, and the platforms on which many of them stand, known as ahu. Polynesian seafarers first arrived on Rapa Nui, 2,300 miles off the coast of Chile, approximately 900 years ago.

They then went on to construct more than 300 ahu and almost 1,000 moai, which are believed to represent significant ancestors.

Explanation:

The authors of the new study, published in the journal PLOS One, sought to understand the distribution of the ahu in order to further understand their creators.

Researchers from six US institutions isolated an eastern area of Rapa Nui, containing 93 ahu. They analyzed the natural resources near the ahu, focusing on rock mulch gardens in which crops like sweet potatoes were grown, marine resources including sites for fishing, and sources of fresh water.

There proved to be no significant correlation between the location of the ahu and the presence of nearby gardens, suggesting that the ahu were not situated in order to monitor or signal control over these resources.

While both marine resources and fresh water sources were found near the ahu, the researchers concluded only the latter was significant; after all, both typically occur in the same locations and fresh water was much less widely available.

6. The Bloop

Mystery:

In 1997 a loud, ultra-low frequency sound, which became known as the “Bloop” was heard on hydrophones across the Pacific. It was so loud, in fact, that it was picked up by listening devices over 3,000 miles apart. The problem was, no-one had any idea what could make such a noise, and for the next decade there was much debate about its cause.

The mystery solved: it wasn’t sea monster

It is much more than just an odd word. It is a mysterious sound that has raised a bit of controversy. To some, it is a mystery that may point to an unknown creature beyond our imagination. To others, it is simply a sound that has not been connected to a source yet, but most likely has a source that is far less surprising. Either way, the Bloop is a mystery, one that intrigues many.

In 2012, NOAA announced they have solved the Bloop mystery. Glacial non-tectonic cryoseisms are causing these mysterious underwater sounds. In other words, they are icequakes. These icequakes, or ice calving, generate whenever glaciers crack or fracture in the ocean. NOAA believes this particular underwater sound emanating around the Bransfield Straits and the Ross Sea off the coast of Antarctica.

7. Mass Whale Graveyard

In 2011, during a road widening project in the Atacama Desert of Chile, builders stumbled across a mass graveyard, but it wasn’t what you might expect. It was full of the bones of whales, strange walrus-faced dolphins and sloths all lying side by side. The fossils were found to be about 6 to 9 million years old, and it became a mystery as to why so many animals would die in one place together, and how it would happen in a place that was 130 feet above sea level.

Photo amazing planet

What caused the mass whale death?

Scientists have uncloaked the mystery of an ancient fossilized graveyard of dozens of whales lying side by side with bizarre, walrus-faced dolphins and swimming sloths.

The fossils, unearthed about three years ago during a road-widening project in Chile’s Atacama Desert, probably record a series of mass strandings about 6 million to 9 million years ago that were caused by blooms of algae fed by the iron-rich sediments of the Andes Mountains, according to a study published online Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The international team of researchers believes about four waves of carcasses washed into what once was a placid tidal basin within a period of weeks, then were buried in sediments that accumulated over 10,000 to 16,000 years, said the study’s lead author, Nicholas D. Pyenson, curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian Institution.

The most likely explanation that encompasses all of that evidence would be an upwelling of ocean water, fed by iron-rich runoff from the nascent Andes, which fed massive algal blooms that poisoned the mammals by direct ingestion or inhalation or through the prey they ate, the study suggested.

8. Blood Falls

Photo exploresweb

Mystery

Because of its remote location and inhospitable environment, there’s a lot still to be discovered in Antarctica. One feature that’s been a mystery ever since they were found are the blood falls in the Mcmurdo Dry Valley. Pouring from the Taylor Glacier, the water is a deep red colour, and has an average temperature of only 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit- well below the freezing point of 32!

Mystery explained

The lake under the glacier has an unusually salty consistency, and because saltwater has a lower freezing point than pure water and releases heat as it freezes, it melts the ice, enabling the rivers to flow.

This means that the glacier can support flowing water and also that this is the coldest glacier on Earth with constantly flowing water—though this water is so filled with iron that it looks like something else entirely.

The study also measured the amount of iron-rich brine in the river water and found the brine content increased as the measurements drew closer to the falls.

Water temperature and brine content were also found to be related: Cracks of various sizes in the glacier let brine into the glacier. Then the brine (pictured here in red to represent the amount of iron present in the water) begins to freeze, and the latent heat warms the ice around it, upping the brine concentration in the center of the cracks.

9. The Legend of Anastasia

Mystery

Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna (June 18, 1901—July 17, 1918) was the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and his wife, Tsarina Alexandra. Along with her parents and young siblings, Anastasia was captured and executed during the Bolshevik Revolution. She is well-known for the mystery that surrounded her death for decades, as numerous women claimed to be Anastasia.

Russia’s Czar Nicholas II’s entire family was murdered in 1918. When the body of Nicholas’s teenage daughter, Anastasia, was not found with the other family members, people hoped that Anastasia had escaped.

In the years following the execution of the Romanov family, conspiracy theories began to emerge. Beginning in 1920, numerous women came forward and claimed to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia.

One of them, Eugenia Smith, wrote her “memoirs” as Anastasia, which included a lengthy description of how she had escaped her captors. Another, Nadezhda Vasilyeva, surfaced in Siberia and was imprisoned by Bolshevik authorities; she died in a mental asylum in 1971.

Anna Anderson was perhaps the best known of the imposters. She claimed that she—Anastasia—had been wounded but survived and was rescued from the basement by a guard who was sympathetic to the royal family. From 1938 until 1970, Anderson battled for recognition as Nicholas’ only surviving child. However, courts in Germany continually found that Anderson had not provided concrete evidence that she was Anastasia.

Explained

In 2007, a Russian builder found burned remains at a forest location that matched a description given by Yurovsky when he detailed where the bodies had been left. A year later, these were identified as the two missing Romanovs, although testing has been inconclusive as to which body was Anastasia and which was Maria.

DNA studies have accounted for both parents and all five children, concluding they did indeed die in July 1918, and in 2000, the Russian Orthodox Church canonized the entire Romanov family as passion bearers.

10. Umbrella Man

Photo economista

Was 'Umbrella Man' Involved in the JFK Assassination?

One of the weirdest enigmas of the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas was the presence of "umbrella man." This blurry figure is seen in photographs raising a black umbrella along the presidential route, even though the sky was clear. Some saw him as proof of a conspiracy — an advance man who was signaling the sniper. Others suspected that he might actually be an assassin himself, firing a poison dart gun concealed in his parasol [source: Jonsson].

But when the U.S. House of Representatives reopened the JFK investigation in the late 1970s, a 53-year-old Dallas warehouse manager named Louie Steven Witt came forward and testified that he was "umbrella man." Granted, his explanation was a bit bizarre: Witt disliked JFK's father, former U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom Joseph P. Kennedy, whom he faulted for supporting British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policies toward Hitler. Chamberlain's trademark was his ever-present umbrella, and Witt chose that day to brandish a big, conspicuous one in an effort to needle the president. He brought along a visual aid to the hearing — a battered black umbrella that he claimed was the one he'd used that day. A committee staffer popped it open, to reveal that it didn't contain a weapon [source: Jonsson].

Witt added, "If the Guinness Book of World Records had a category for people doing the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong place, I would be No. 1"

11. Death of King Richard III

The English monarch Richard III, whom Shakespeare portrayed as a megalomaniacal, malevolent hunchback, is one of the most famous villains in history. But while we've long known that Richard met defeat and apparently suffered his demise at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, it remained a mystery exactly how he died. Was he killed in battle? And if so, what happened to his body, which was never found and identified?

Explained

After more than 500 years, those questions were finally answered. In 2012, an old grave was discovered under a parking lot in Leicester, England, and five months later, DNA tests confirmed that the bones buried there belonged to Richard III. Additionally, in a 2014 study published in the Lancet, researchers revealed that forensic evidence showed that Richard had suffered 11 wounds, including nine blows to the skull. The lack of defensive wounds on his arms or hands led researchers to conclude that he had lost his helmet or removed it during the fighting, and then was killed either in sustained combat with an opponent, or else had been set upon by multiple attackers. They also found that while Richard had a spinal deformity (scoliosis), he did not have a withered arm or a limp, as Shakespeare depicted him.

12. How were the Pyramids built?

Photo Britannica

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, proponents of the hypothesis that human civilization had been jump-started by extraterrestrial visitors pointed to the Egyptian pyramids as persuasive evidence. The ancient Egyptians could not have moved those massive multi-ton stone blocks with just muscle power, they argued, and suggested that alien anti-gravity technology was a more, uh, plausible explanation.

Explained

Fortunately, in 2014, University of Amsterdam physicists materialized to rescue us from paperback pseudoscience. By analyzing an ancient tomb drawing, they figured out that a large team of workers could have hauled the giant stone blocks on a sled, and poured water on the sand in their path to reduce the friction and make it possible to drag the blocks to the pyramid. A small amount of water would cause the sand to become glued together and create a sort of paved road. Other researchers also have suggested that the Egyptians used clay as a lubricant, and it may be that they used more than one method.

13. Collapse of Mayan Civilization

For a long time, people have puzzled about one of the freakiest societal collapses in human history. Why did the Maya people abandon dozens of cities they'd built in the Yucatan peninsula in the 700s or 800s C.E., and allow what had been a highly developed civilization to turn into ruins?

Some have theorized that the Maya were probably defeated in battle by rival peoples or that the ruling class was overthrown in a peasant revolt. Others have advanced more outlandish explanations, such as an invasion by UFOs.

Explained

But in a study published in 2012, Arizona State University researchers, who analyzed archaeological data with an eye to figuring out environmental conditions in the Mayan heyday, found evidence to substantiate a theory first advocated by historian Jared Diamond in his 2005 book "Collapse." The Maya, the researchers discovered, had burned and chopped down so much of the forests that they had altered the land's ability to absorb solar radiation, which in turn made clouds and rainfall scarce. That exacerbated a naturally occurring drought, and caused erosion and soil depletion, which caused agriculture to fail. With less food available, workers were forced to leave the lowland cities to avoid starvation, and everything collapsed as a result.

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