49 Strangest Mysteries That Were Actually Solved

No one knew how the islanders of Easter Island moved their giant heads from one place to another. When asked how they did it, the islanders said they walked them. This sounded impossible and silly to Europeans so they ignored it. But a team of archeologists and native islanders a few years back made their own Easter Island head, tied 4 big ropes around it, then had a dozen guys on each rope pull the head side to side. It rocked corner to corner causing it to "walk" forward down the road.

So definitely not aliens.

I still don’t know why everyone asks “why don’t we have flying cars yet?”

Think about the average American driver, now give them a pilot’s license.

The Roanoke colony wasn't destroyed by natives or kidnapped by aliens. They joined the local native tribe. We can tell because people in the tribe were born with blonde hair and blue eyes for decades after the colonials went "missing".

How the pyramids were built.

For some reason, people *still* keep saying we don’t know. Well, we do. It boils down to math + money + grunt work. The core workers and project leaders were professionals, and some slaves (likely not thousands and thousands, as previously assumed) were used for labor. It’s also known that low wage workers were used as well.

That’s it. It’s not magic. And it’s insulting to ancient people to claim that they couldn’t have had any sort of mathematical accuracy or the ability to build with precise lines. Of course they could do that. They had ropes and pulleys and understood leverage and design. They knew what tools to use. They had artisans and engineers.

The mysterious trails of rocks at Racetrack Playa" in Death Valley National Park, California.
For many years, the cause of these mysterious rock movements was unknown. However, in recent years, scientists have discovered that the rocks move due to a combination of wind and ice. During periods of rain or melting snow, water freezes into thin sheets of ice on the surface of the lake bed. When the ice breaks apart, it can be moved by wind, and as the ice sheets move, they push the rocks along with them, leaving behind the distinctive trails.

Ships and planes never mysteriously vanished in the bemuda triangle, sinks sank because of rough weather, and planes dropped because they hit airborne pockets of methane and the engines stalled.

Thanks to modern navigation, not a single ship or planes sank there in over 20 years.

The "bloop" sound that was recorded in the Pacific Ocean that baffled scientists was finally found to be an icequake.

Whether the Titanic sank in one piece or not.

Many discounted those survivors who said they saw her split in two because they had a hard time believing such a mighty ship could rip apart like that.

It wasn’t until Ballard and his crew found her that the truth was revealed.

How to make gold from lead.

Hundreds of years the alchemists tried it unsuccessfully. Today it is possible using a particle accelerator. However, it is far from cost efficient - mining gold is orders of magnitudes cheaper.

It was old man Jasper all along!

He pretended to be the ghost because he wanted to scare all the tourists away, that way he could search for the treasure all by himself!

"Did we just find Noah's Ark?"

No, they did not.

Torosaurus was actually a mature triceratops. Nanotyrannus was a baby T Rex. Stigymoloch and Dracorex are younger Pachycephalosaurus skeletons. Anatotitan was a grown up Edmontosaurus and I think there was a few others just because baby dinosaurs looked drastically different than adults.

Aerodynamicicists understand perfectly well how insects, e.g. bees, fly. It's not the same as aircraft, but the clap-fling mechanism, the vortices they produce, and the resulting thrust and lift have been accurately modeled and match the measurements.

The "Miraculous Staircase" in the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. There was even a movie made about it starring Barbara Hershey.

One of the myths is that it stands miraculously without a center support pole and no engineer can figure out how that's possible. The center stringer is tightly wrapped with only 8" diameter. It acts as the center pole.

Nuns said a nine-day novena for a much-needed staircase, a woodworker miraculously showed up from nowhere and built the staircase. It must have been Saint Joseph! The staircase was ordered from France. The manufacturer sent a guy to put it together.

It's made of wood found nowhere in the area, it's a miracle! Because the wood is from France, duh.

And finally the guy who built it stayed in Santa Fe afterward. The local newspaper had his obituary (1896 or 1898) and even said he was the man who built the staircase.

Elisa Lam, the woman found dead in the water tank on top of a hotel in Los Angeles. It wasn't a crime or ghost, she was mentally ill having a bipolar episode.

The rediscoveries of lost cities such as:

The rediscovery of the location of Pompei in 1748.

The rediscovery of the location of Herculaneum in 1709.

The discovery of the location of Macchu Picchu in 1911.

How cat(er)pillars become butterflies. When I was 12 I wanted to go university to be the first person to discover how they do it.

(Once catapillars have a cocoon, they secrete an enzyme that turns them into a puddle of stem cell filled goop and then that becomes a butterfly).

Can you sail from Europe to Asia (and back to Europe) by going west?

Yes, BECAUSE THE EARTH IS ROUND AND NOT FLAT.

Spontaneous generation. People used to think flies would spontaneously appear from rotten meat, as every time they had it, flies somehow would appear even though flies were no where close when the meat was okay. After observation and experiments, we understood flies landed in the meat, left their eggs, and then more flies would be born and then stay to eat the meat.

The mystery of the Mary Toft: In 1726, a woman in England claimed to have given birth to rabbits. While it was believed to be a medical mystery at the time, it was later discovered that the rabbits had been inserted into her womb by a local surgeon.