Top 10 Real Events That Left Experts Without Answers

Bread that drove an entire town insane, jelly-like blobs raining from the sky, and an explosive that should have killed 150 people, but didn't. These are real events that left experts without answers. And we begin with the tale of the Cursed Bread. In August 1951, a quiet village in southern France called Pont Saint-Esprit suddenly descended into total chaos. Overnight, hundreds of people started having these horrific hallucinations. People started saying they were seeing their houses shrinking, claiming to feel snakes eating their insides, or thought they were being chased by dragons. Over 300 villagers were affected by this. Dozens were hauled off to asylums in straitjackets, and five people ended up dead. For decades, the expert consensus was that this was a classic case of ergot poisoning. Ergot is a fungus that grows on rye, and can cause hallucinations similar to LSD if it's baked into bread. It seemed like an open and shut case of a baker using bad flour. But the mystery reopened years later, when researchers started looking at these symptoms again. Ergot poisoning usually comes with physical signs, like gangrene, which didn't happen here. Then an investigative journalist named Hank Alborelli found declassified CIA documents. The documents mentioned the town by name in the context of Project MK Ultra, the secret government program for mind control, which we've covered a number of times on the channel. Some researchers now believe the town was actually a test site for an aerosolized LSD experiment, or a contaminated food study run by the U.S. military. Swear to God I'm not making that up. It doesn't mean that's actually the case, but it is one theory. In August of 1994, the small town of Oakville, Washington experienced a very strange weather event. Over the course of three weeks, instead of rain, people watched as these translucent, gelatinous blobs fell from the sky. They were described as being roughly the size of half a grain of rice. Almost immediately after the blobs started falling, a large percentage of the town started to develop severe flu-like symptoms. Extreme exhaustion, nausea, and respiratory issues that lasted for months. Even the animals were hit by this, with several outdoor pets falling ill and dying shortly after coming into contact with these strange blobs. A man named Sonny Barclift took a sample of the stuff to a doctor, who eventually noticed something disturbing. The goo contained human white blood cells. Then the Washington State Department of Ecology did some testing. Their microbiologist, Mike McDowell, said that the blobs were teeming with two specific types of bacteria. One was a common strain found in the human digestive system. The other was a soil bacteria. For a while, the leading theory was that a military plane had discharged waste over the town. But the Federal Aviation Administration quickly pointed out that airplane waste is dyed blue. Plus, they don't just dump it mid-flight. To this day, we still don't know what these mysterious blobs were or where they came from. On a clear morning in February 1979, five friends boarded a Boston Whaler, called the Sarah Joe, in Maui, Hawaii. They were heading out for a day of fishing, but then a massive, unexpected storm rolled in. The boat and the five men vanished. The Coast Guard carried out a massive search, but they found absolutely nothing. Not even debris. The case went cold for nearly a decade until 1988, when a marine biologist working for the National Marine Fisheries Service was doing a survey in the Marshall Islands. He found the wreckage of the Sarah Joe on this remote, uninhabited atoll. Next to the boat was a shallow grave marked by a crude wooden cross made of driftwood. Inside the grave were the jawbone and several remains of one of the missing men, Scott Moorman. So, mystery solved, right? Well, not exactly. The thing is, the Marshall Islands are thousands of miles upwind from where the boat disappeared. They should have been pushed in the opposite direction. Second, a team of biologists had done a thorough survey of that exact spot six years earlier, in 1982. And they testified that the boat and the grave were definitely not there at the time. If the boat arrived after 1982, it means it was floating in the open ocean for at least three years before landing. And what about the other four men? And who buried Moorman? To this day, nobody knows. In the desert of Durango, Mexico, there's a specific patch of land known as the Zona del Silencio, or the Silent Zone. In 1970, the U.S. launched an Athena test missile from Green River, Utah. The missile was supposed to land in New Mexico, but it inexplicably veered hundreds of miles off course, heading straight for the Silent Zone. When the recovery teams arrived, they found that their radio equipment had stopped working. Communication between the recovery crews was nearly impossible because radio waves just wouldn't transmit. Area has been studied by a number of scientific groups who've confirmed that the zone is a kind of dead spot for radio, television, and shortwave signals. There are massive amounts of magnanite and uranium in the soil, which could cause the magnetic interference, but that doesn't fully explain why the interference is so localized. And to make it weirder, the zone seems to act like a giant magnet for space junk. It has one of the highest rates of meteorite strikes anywhere on Earth. Some people think the whole silent thing is a bit blown out of proportion, but plenty of pilots have reported their instruments going totally haywire, or just flatlining the second they fly over the area. Even the animals there are built differently. There's a specific type of tortoise in the zone, and it has these strange physical mutations that you won't find in the exact same species living just a few miles away. On September 22, 1979, an American Vela satellite specifically designed to monitor secret nuclear tests detected this double flash of light in the remote Indian Ocean, near the Prince Edward Islands. In nuclear physics, a double flash is the telltale sign of nuclear detonation. The first flash is the initial blast. The second is the fireball expanding. So naturally, the US government went into full crisis mode, assuming someone had just set off a nuke in the middle of nowhere. But when they sent surveillance planes to the area to collect air samples, they found absolutely zero radioactive fallout. A White House panel of scientists eventually said that the satellite had probably just been hit by what's called a zoo event, which is just a way of saying that a tiny meteoroid might have struck the sensor at just the right angle to trick it. But physicists weren't really buying that. They argued that the chances of a random meteor perfectly mimicking the exact light signature of a nuclear blast was basically zero. To make things even weirder, underwater sensors picked up a massive sound wave at the exact same time, which is exactly what you'd expect from an ocean explosion. To this day, the case is unresolved. This one is super gross. In March 1876, a woman named Mrs. Crouch was sitting on her porch in Bath County, Kentucky, when chunks of fresh red meat began falling from the clear blue sky. And it wasn't just a few scraps. It fell like rain all over town. Sounds like a tall tale, but this is a well-documented case. It was even covered by the New York Times and Scientific American. And a few people, and I'm not sure whether to call them brave souls or just idiots, and yes, they actually did this, they decided to test the meat, reporting that it tasted like mutton or venison, but they couldn't quite place the animal. Some independent researchers did a microscopic analysis and found that the meat contained bits of lung, muscle, and cartilage. So where did it all come from? Well, first there's the vulture theory, ideas that a large flock of vultures flying overhead had recently gorged themselves on a dead cow or a horse. And when they took flight, they collectively vomited to lighten their load. This is a thing, apparently, but many people who were there insisted the meat fell from a height and that there was a strange snapping sound. Plus, there were no reports of any massive flocks of birds in the area that day. Since we can't exactly re-examine the 150-year-old meat, this remains one of the most bizarre weather events in history. This one sounds like a total urban legend, but it is rooted in some very strange reports from air traffic controllers in Caracas, Venezuela. In 1992, a plane suddenly appeared on radar out of nowhere. The pilot contacted the tower, sounding panicked, and told him he was flight 914, scheduled to land in Miami on July 2, 1955. The controllers were stunned. Apparently, they were looking at a plane that was 37 years late. The pilot managed to land the plane. The ground crew could see the faces of the passengers pressed against the windows. They looked terrified. Before the authorities could get to the aircraft, though, the pilot screamed into the radio, don't come near us. We're leaving now. He taxied the plane back to the runway and took off before anyone could stop him. No one has ever found a record of where that plane went after it took off from Caracas. And while many people claim the story was a hoax from a tabloid, no one's been able to explain the specific air traffic logs that recorded this unidentified vintage aircraft entering restricted airspace that day. In July 1952, for two weekends in a row, the most restricted airspace in the world was basically invaded, and the U.S. government had zero answers. Air traffic controllers at Washington National Airport started seeing seven blips on their radar. The objects were moving at about 130 miles per hour, but would suddenly accelerate to over 7,000 miles per hour. For context, the fastest jets at the time could barely hit 600 miles per hour. The Air Force sent out some jets to see what was going on, but as soon as the jets got there, the blips vanished from the radar. As soon as they headed back to base to refuel, the blips popped right back up in the exact same spots. This happened multiple times. It was like whatever was up there was actually monitoring the pilot's radio chatter. The explanation at the time was a temperature inversion, basically saying that the radar was bouncing off a layer of warm air and creating mirages. But radar operators who had years of experience called BS on that, pointing out that a temperature inversion looks like a steady ghostly blur on a screen, not distinct objects performing high-speed maneuvers over the White House. In January 1921, a massive schooner called the Carroll A. Deering was found run aground off the coast of North Carolina. When the Coast Guard was finally able to get on board, they found that the galley was full of food being prepped for the next meal. But not a single soul was on the ship. The lifeboats were gone, and so were the ship's logs and navigation equipment. But all the crew's personal belongings were sitting in their cabins. There were no signs of a fight, and the ship was in perfectly good condition. The government launched a massive investigation involving the FBI and the Treasury Department. They looked into every theory from pirates to mutiny. During the heat of the investigation, a man named Christopher Columbus Gray claimed that he found a message in a bottle from the crew. The note said the ship had been captured by a mysterious oil-burning vessel, and that the crew was being held prisoner. So, the FBI started investigating. And, unfortunately, they'd been completely thrown off course. Turned out that note was a total fake. Gray had written it himself. Had found it because he was desperate for a job at the local White House, and thought he'd look like a hero when he found a major lead in a national mystery. I don't think he ended up getting the job. Once the note was debunked, the FBI was back at square one. If it was a mutiny, why was there no struggle? If they hit bad weather and used the lightboats, why didn't a single piece of debris or a single body ever wash up on the coast? The investigation was officially closed in 1922 without a single person being able to explain what happened to those 11 men. With all that said, I have been your host James, and I will catch you, yes you specifically, in the next video.