The Unexplained Files

Cold cases, declassified files, and archive photographs
everyone else miscaptions.

Every claim sourced. Every source named.

[The Unexplained Files @unexplained_fs]

In 1984 someone laced Japanese candy with cyanide and put it back on supermarket shelves.

Then they printed labels for it.

"Danger. Poisoned. Eat this and Die."

Then they announced the next batch would carry no warning at all.

They terrorised the country for a year and a half.

Nobody ever died from the candy.

(The Glico sign, Dotonbori, Osaka.)

[The Unexplained Files @unexplained_fs]

@konstructivizm The two clusters are NGC 869 and NGC 884, about 7,500 light years away and only around 14 million years old, and Hipparchus had already recorded the patch of light in Perseus by about 130 BC.

[The Unexplained Files @unexplained_fs]

@historyinmemes The diary is the Kanpyō Gyoki of Emperor Uda, the oldest surviving Japanese court diary, and only fragments covering 887 to 890 remain, about fourteen printed pages, with most of the rest lost during the Ōnin War of the 1460s and 70s.

[The Unexplained Files @unexplained_fs]

@archaeologymag The ring came out of a burial at Don Yai Thong in Phetchaburi province, and the inscription is Brahmi script reading pusarakhitasa, a name form tied to the Vaishya merchant caste rather than to any local Thai elite.

[The Unexplained Files @unexplained_fs]

@PublicDomainRev Bontecou was surgeon in charge of Harewood Hospital in Washington from October 1863 to June 1866, a 3,000 bed army general hospital and one of the largest of the war, and the portraits are now held by the National Library of Medicine.

[The Unexplained Files @unexplained_fs]

@ancientorigins Anne d'Alegre died in 1619 and was found in a lead coffin at the Chateau de Laval in 1988, but it took a cone beam scan 35 years later to show the false tooth was elephant ivory rather than the hippopotamus ivory usual at the time.

[The Unexplained Files @unexplained_fs]

@Rainmaker1973 The ladder that finally burned went up at dawn on 15 June 2015 off Huiyu Island near Quanzhou, lasted about 150 seconds, and was the fourth attempt in 21 years after three earlier proposals failed.

[The Unexplained Files @unexplained_fs]

@SmithsonianMag Swartwout's patent is US 94,043, and what it actually claims is not the waffle iron itself but a wooden handle and connecting rod that let a cook in Troy, New York flip the iron and open its jaws without burning their hands.

[The Unexplained Files @unexplained_fs]

@USNatArchives @uspto The Slinky patent was filed on 21 August 1946 and granted on 28 January 1947 as US 2,415,012 under the plain title Toy and Process of Use, and what it claims is a helical spring that walks down a set of steps on nothing but gravity.

[The Unexplained Files @unexplained_fs]

Sources

The object is a single-sheet print, a coloured woodcut with letterpress text below it, 26 by 38 cm, with the imprint "Bey Hanns Glaser Brieffmaler zu Nürmberg". Glaser was a Nuremberg letter-painter, a trade that printed and sold such sheets.

The text, read from the sheet itself: on the fourteenth day of April 1561, "zwischen 4 und 5 auff der kleinen uhr", between four and five in the morning, a frightening sight appeared at the rising sun and was seen in the city, before the gate and in the country by many men and women. It describes blood-red arcs, globes, crosses and tubes that fought together "bey einer guten stundt", about a good hour, then fell from the sun to the earth "gleich als ob es alles Brennet", as if it all burned, and faded away in a great smoke; then a black spear. It closes: what such signs mean, God alone knows, and asks the reader to mend their life. The English translation used by Wikipedia and the Public Domain Review says the same.

Original at the Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Graphische Sammlung, shelfmark PAS II 1/12, digitised on https://t.co/VOAcIEKutE under the Public Domain Mark: https://t.co/75u2hBeYRL Catalogue record, Graphikportal: https://t.co/kzz4f9ORgm

The sheet became known outside Germany after Carl Jung reproduced it in Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, 1958. https://t.co/WqtnMUG9I4 https://t.co/uqHJxxZDfI

Images: Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Public Domain Mark, credited in the ALT text.

[The Unexplained Files @unexplained_fs]

Nuremberg, 14 April 1561. This circulates as a UFO battle over the city.

It is a news-sheet, sold that year by letter-painter Hans Glaser. Its own text says the shapes fought for an hour, then fell and faded in smoke.

Glaser ends: what such signs mean, God alone knows.

[The Unexplained Files @unexplained_fs]

Sources

Found 4 December 1872 at 38 20 N, 17 15 W by the brigantine Dei Gratia, Captain David Reed Morehouse; boarded by mate Oliver Deveau. Condition on boarding, the missing yawl, chronometer, sextant and register, and the untouched stores: Deveau's testimony to the Vice Admiralty Court at Gibraltar, reported in American Heritage and Royal Museums Greenwich.

Built 1861 at Spencer's Island, Nova Scotia as the Amazon; registered at New York as Mary Celeste, December 1868. Sailed 7 November 1872 for Genoa with 1,701 barrels of alcohol, ten people aboard. Smithsonian Magazine and https://t.co/gAu7A4ETwo.

Last log slate entry 25 November 1872, six miles from Santa Maria in the Azores.

Solly-Flood's murder theory, the sword, and the marks on the bow: Vice Admiralty Court record. The stains were chemically analysed and were not blood; the bow marks were examined by Captain Shufeldt of the US Navy and found to be natural sea action. No barrel had been tampered with. The court found no evidence of foul play and made a salvage award to the Dei Gratia.

"J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement", published anonymously in The Cornhill Magazine, January 1884, by Arthur Conan Doyle. It supplies the spelling Marie Celeste, the boats still on the davits, the perfectly watertight ship, and the cargo of tallow and American clocks.

Consul Horatio Sprague and Solly-Flood both responded to the story as though it were a real account.

The Abel Fosdyk papers, The Strand Magazine, November 1913, presented by A. Howard Linford. The Pemberton hoax by Laurence J. Keating, 1929, exposed by Macdonald Hastings.

That the warm tea, the half eaten meal and the sleeping cat are not in Doyle's text: Paul Begg, Mary Celeste: The Greatest Mystery of the Sea, 2006, and confirmed against the story itself. The Gibraltar testimony records that there was nothing to eat or drink on the cabin table.

Images public domain via Wikimedia Commons, credited in the ALT text. Map by OpenStreetMap contributors.

[The Unexplained Files @unexplained_fs]

On 4 December 1872 a ship was found sailing herself across the Atlantic with nobody aboard.

She was seaworthy. There was six months of food and water below. Nothing had been stolen.

Ten people had left her. Not one of the ten was ever seen again.

[The Unexplained Files @unexplained_fs]

Here is the part that should bother you.

The half eaten breakfast. The tea still warm in the cups. The cat asleep on a locker. Everyone credits those to Conan Doyle.

They are not in his story. Search the text and the words are simply not there. Nobody knows who added them.

And the record says the opposite. The testimony reads: there was nothing to eat or drink on the cabin table, and no evidence of preparations being made for eating.

Benjamin Briggs was a careful, sober, experienced master. He had his own savings invested in that ship. He had his wife and his two year old daughter aboard.

He left a sound vessel for a small open boat in the middle of the Atlantic.

Whatever he saw, he judged the boat the safer place. That is the mystery. It is not the one you were told.

Follow @unexplained_fs for the files that never closed.

[The Unexplained Files @unexplained_fs]

@onlmaps The chain was formed on the 50th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact's secret protocol, and the photographs and documents recording it were inscribed in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2009.