9. This unnerving precipitation:
The Oakville Blobs.
Basically, it started raining one day and citizens noted that the rain wasn’t water, it was strange jelly blobs. It happened six times in the next three weeks, and mass sickness followed.
10. This perplexing arson case:
The Sodder Children Disappearance
To summarize: a fire starts in the Sodder house, and the parents and 4 of the 9 children there get out. The other 5 are never seen again, and the parents suspect that they were alive and had been taken somewhere else because no bones or other human remains were found in the ashes.
There are many theories and explanations to support them. I would just like to know what happened that night.
11. This mystifying missing persons case:
I told this one before but…
Rico Harris. He was a massive 6’9″ former Harlem Globetrotter basketball player who had drug issues earlier in his life, but had made a full recovery and was getting his life back on track. He was driving along California’s Interstate I-5, from his home in Southern California to Seattle, to live with his girlfriend. He was somewhere just north of Sacramento, exhausted, and told his girlfriend over the phone that he wanted to check out the mountains. All calls stopped since then.
His car was found a couple days later by a patrolman near a rest stop in the mountains. A massive search was launched. No signs of him. The strangest part? A driver later reported seeing a massive 6’9″ individual wandering down the highway, just a mile from where the car was found – a week later. A search was re-launched, massive size 17 footprints were found in the ground that were not there before, they were getting very close, and then… Nothing. No trace, nobody, nothing.
Where did Rico go the first time he disappeared? Where was he for an entire week? And where did he disappear to again? The fact that someone could disappear twice, is what makes this so damn mystifying to me.
12. The appearance of this odd stranger:
I find the story of Kaspar Hauser, an anonymous teenager found wandering the streets of Nuremberg in the early 19th century, fascinating.
He appeared out of nowhere with no family, friends or anyone who could confirm his identity. He claimed to have been kept in almost total isolation for his whole life up until that point. His linguistic skills were severely limited, consistent with someone who had grown up with very little human contact.
Rumours began to circulate that he was actually a German prince who had been swapped at birth with a dead baby to prevent his succession to the throne by scheming relatives. Rather than kill him, they locked him up in complete isolation and left there to be forgotten, until somehow he was freed or managed to escape.
He attracted several wealthy sponsors over the course of his short life, but none were successful at solving the mystery of his origins. He died under suspicious circumstances (stabbed by an unknown assailant) 5 years after being found. Of course he may have just been a deranged fantasist or attention seeker – who knows!