Mysteries

On November 24, 1971 — the day before Thanksgiving — a man calling himself “Dan Cooper” bought a one-way ticket from Portland to Seattle. He paid cash. He boarded a Boeing 727. He ordered a bourbon and soda. And somewhere over the dense forests of southwest Washington State, in the middle of a rainstorm, wearing a business suit and a parachute, he stepped out of the back of the airplane at roughly 10,000 feet — and vanished completely. ...

On the night of February 1, 1959, nine experienced Soviet hikers cut their way out of their tent from the inside and fled into the darkness of a Ural mountain in temperatures approaching minus 30 degrees Celsius. They were found weeks later in states that defied easy explanation — some with catastrophic internal injuries but no external wounds, one missing her tongue, several with traces of radiation on their clothing, and all of them dead. ...