Unsolved Mysteries

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370

One of the most recent unsolved mysteries is that of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which vanished on Saturday, March 8, 2014. An international flight from Malaysia to Beijing, it carried 227 passengers and 12 crew members. The aircraft made its last voice contact with air traffic control less than an hour after takeoff and disappeared from radar screens minutes later. Malaysian military radar tracked the plane for almost an hour after that, but then lost it over the Andaman Sea. There was no distress signal, bad weather warnings, or technical problems. Theories range from hijacking to black holes to aliens, but perhaps the strangest is the theory that Pitbull and Shakira display prior knowledge of the flight's disappearance in their song, "Get It Started."

 

The Mary Celeste

What became of the crew and passengers of this British-American ship remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the sea. The name has since become synonymous worldwide with derelict ‘ghost ships’. The Mary Celeste was found drifting 400 miles east of the Azores by the crew of another cargo-carrying vessel, the Dei Gratia, on 5 December, 1872. The leader of the boarding party told a British board of inquiry at Gibraltar that he found the ship was “a thoroughly wet mess”, with possessions left behind and the lifeboat missing. No trace of Captain Benjamin Spooner Briggs, his wife and their young daughter or the seven experienced crew members has ever been found. Many ingenious theories have been put forward by writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle to explain what happened to them.