World’s biggest unsolved mysteries!

Nothing interests us more than things that remain unresolved; they have the power to captivate the mind and challenge the brain with their intrigue and complexity! It’s the 21st century, and still, some mysteries remain unsolved and mysterious.

World's biggest unsolved mysteries!
World’s biggest unsolved mysteries!

Despite the greatest efforts of the world’s cleverest historians, bounty hunters, and cryptographers, our history is replete with riddles that continue to confound us to date. Here’s a list of the world’s most intriguing unsolved mysteries and codes.

The Voynich Manuscript and Kryptos
The Voynich Manuscript and Kryptos

The Voynich Manuscript

Named after the Polish – American bookseller Wilfred M. Voynich who acquired it in 1912, the manuscript is a detailed 240-page book written in an unknown language. Its pages are filled with colorful drawings of strange diagrams, odd events, and plants that do not match any known species, adding to the difficulty of deciphering the document.

The document’s author remains unknown, but carbon dating proves the pages were made sometime between 1404 and 1438. It’s called “the world’s most mysterious manuscript.”

Kryptos

Designed by artist Jim Sanborn, the sculpture sits outside the CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. It’s so mysterious that not even the CIA has completely solved it. The sculpture contains four inscriptions, three of which have been cracked, but the fourth remains elusive.

Sanborn let slip in 2006 that the first three contain clues to crack the fourth inscription, and again in 2010, he released another clue that: the Letters 64-69 NYPVTT in part 4 encode the text BERLIN. Think you can crack the code??

Beale Ciphers and Phaistos Disc
Beale Ciphers and Phaistos Disc

Beale Ciphers

They are three ciphertexts, the keys to one of the grandest buried treasures in U.S history said to be thousands of pounds of gold, silver, and jewels. Initially, a mysterious man named Thomas Jefferson Beale obtained the treasure in 1818 while prospecting in Colorado. Of the three ciphers, only the 2nd has been cracked.

The Declaration of Independence turned out to be a clue given by the fact that Beale shares his name with the author of the Declaration of Independence. The cracked text reveals the county where the treasure was buried: Bedford, Va., but its exact location is encrypted in the uncracked texts.

Phaistos Disc

Italian archeologist Luigi Pernier discovered them in 1908 in the Minoan palace site of Phaistos. The disc made of fired clay has mysterious symbols that may represent an unknown form of hieroglyphics.

Believed to be designed in the second millennium BC, some scholars propose that the hieroglyphs resemble Linear A and Linear B, scripts once used in ancient Crete. The only problem is that Linear A is still undeciphered.

Shugborough Inscription and Taman Shud Case
Shugborough Inscription and Taman Shud Case

Shugborough Inscription

Looking from far off at the 18th century Shepherd’s Monument in Staffordshire, England and you might not notice much apart from the fact that it’s a sculpted re-creation of Nicolas Poussin’s famous painting “Arcadian Shepherds.”

But look closer, and you’ll notice a curious sequence of letters – DOUOSVAVVM, a code that eludes decipherment for over 250 years. The identity of the code carver is unknown, but some say that it could be a clue left by the Knights Templar as to the whereabouts of the Holy Grail.

Taman Shud Case

One of the most profound mysteries of Australia, the case revolves around a man found dead on Somerton beach in Adelaide. Apart from the fact that the man could never be identified, the mystery deepened after a tiny piece of paper was found with the words “Taman Shud” written in a hidden pocket in the dead man’s trousers.

The phrase translates to “ended” or “finished” and is used on the last page of Omar Khayyam’s collection of poems called “The Rubaiyat.” Adding to its mystery, a copy of the collection was later found that contained a scribbled code believed to be a suicide note by the dead man. Yet, it remains untracked, and so does the case.

The WOW! Signal and Zodiac Letters
The WOW! Signal and Zodiac Letters

The WOW! Signal

Jerry Ehman, a volunteer for SETI, might have become the first man ever to receive an intentional message from an alien world while scanning radio waves from deeper space. The signal lasted 72 seconds which is the most extended period the array could measure Ehman was using.

It was loud and appeared to have been transmitted from a place no human has gone before in the constellation Sagittarius near a star called Tau Sagittarii, 120 light-years away. Ehman had written the words “Wow!” on the original printout of the signal and hence the name. All attempts to locate the signal again have failed to lead to controversy about its origin and meaning.

Zodiac letters

They are a series of four encrypted messages believed to be written by the Zodiac killer who terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area residents in the late 1960s and early 70s. They were written to mock the journalists and police, and though one of the letters has been deciphered, the other three remain untracked, as well as the identity of the killer.

Georgia Guidestones and Rongorongo
Georgia Guidestones and Rongorongo

Georgia Guidestones

Also called the “American Stonehenge,” the Georgia Guidestones in Elbert County, Ga. is a granite monument erected in 1979 engraved in 8 languages – English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese and Russian, each relaying ten new commandments’ for “age of reason.” Though the monument contains no encrypted messages, it aligns with certain astronomical features; however, its purpose and origin are shrouded in mystery.

Commissioned by a man by the pseudonym R.C Christian who is yet to be properly identified, the first one of the 10 commandments is highly controversial as it states, “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature”, taken by many to be a license to cull the human population down to the specified number. Some theorists say they may have been designed by a “Luciferian secret society” calling for new world order.

Rongorongo

Discovered written on various artifacts on Easter Island, Rongorongo is a system of mysterious glyphs many believe represents a lost system of writing or proto-writing. It could be one of just three or four independent inventions of writing in human history. They remain undecipherable, and their valid message, which some believe could offer hints about the intriguing statue building Easter Island civilization, may be lost forever.

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