Unsolved Mysteries That May Never Have Answers

A message carved into hundreds of city streets that nobody can explain, a civil war treasure code that stumped the CIA for over a century, and a body found buried in a tree that police still can't name, and a small town in Missouri where three women vanished into thin air and left their dinner on the stove. These are the ones where there's no neat little bow at the end. No arrest, no confession, sometimes not even a name. Just questions. Let's get into it. So starting in the 1980s, people in Philadelphia, and eventually over a hundred cities across the US and even South America, started finding these tiles embedded directly into the asphalt of busy streets. Like, melted right into the road. And they all say some version of the same cryptic message. Toynbee idea in movie 2001, resurrect dead on planet Jupiter. I mean, what? Apparently it's referencing historian Arnold Toynbee and the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey, and it seems to be about resurrecting the dead using Jupiter, somehow. It is believed to be the work of one guy, maybe with some copycats later, but nobody has ever been caught doing this. Nobody knows how he, or they, or whoever it is got the tiles that deep into the road without getting caught. There's an entire subculture of people who now track new tile sightings online, and whoever is doing it, if they're even still alive, has never explained a single thing. In May of 2008, 19-year-old Brandon was driving home late at night in rural Minnesota when he ran his car into a ditch. He called his parents around 2am, completely calm, said he was fine, and started walking. His dad stayed on the phone with him the entire time, for 47 minutes, and then, near the end of the call, Brandon suddenly says, oh ----, and the line goes dead. His dad heard what sounded like water in the background right before it cut out. His car was found in the ditch exactly where he said it was, his phone was found nearby, but Brandon himself has never been found. Not a trace, despite massive searches of nearby rivers and fields, what did he see? What happened in that last second? Nobody knows. So legend goes that back in 1822, a guy named Thomas Jefferson Beale, okay, different Thomas Jefferson, buried a massive treasure somewhere in Bedford County, Virginia. We're talking gold, silver, jewels, worth tens of millions today. And he supposedly left behind three encoded ciphers that tell you exactly where it is, how much is there, and who it belongs to. One of the three ciphers has actually been cracked, it used the Declaration of Independence as the key, and it describes the treasure in detail. But the other two? Nothing. Cryptographers, treasure hunters, literal code breakers from the NSA in their off hours have thrown everything at these ciphers for almost 200 years and gotten nowhere. Some people think the whole thing's a hoax, dreamed up to sell pamphlets, others have spent their entire lives and life savings digging up random hillsides in Virginia looking for it. Apparently at least one guy died doing it. I don't know about you, but I'd want a little more confirmation before I started digging up someone's backyard. This one's out in the middle of nowhere in Siberia, discovered by a geologist in 1949, and it's this huge cone-shaped mound, like 500 feet across, sitting in a forest where absolutely nothing else like it exists. Locals apparently called it the Fire Eagle Nest, and avoided it. Animals reportedly wouldn't go near it either. Scientists have proposed basically everything. A meteorite impact, a failed underground nuclear test, a weird volcanic gas explosion, even a chunk of neutron star material. But every theory has a problem. There's no meteorite fragments, there's no obvious volcanic activity in the area, trees around it are dying in a weird pattern that some researchers link to possible low-level radiation, but even that's disputed. It is said to still be actively breathing. Like the ground shifts and steams occasionally. Nobody agrees on what it is, it's just there. In July of 1974, a woman's body was found in the dunes near Provincetown, Massachusetts. She had her life brutally taken, and for over 45 years, nobody could identify her. No name, no missing persons match, nothing. Investigators tried everything over the decades, forensic sketches, isotope analysis to figure out where she grew up. Even exhuming and re-examining the body multiple times. In 2022, using advanced DNA technology, they finally identified her as Ruth Marie Terry. Which is genuinely one of the only wins on this entire list. But here's the thing, identifying her didn't solve the crime. Whoever killed her has never been named, never been caught, and the case remains wide open decades later. So we got her name back, we just never got her justice. This is a sculpture that's literally sitting on the grounds of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, installed in 1990, covered edge to edge in encrypted text. Four separate encoded sections. And get this, three of the four have been solved. Mostly by code breakers working completely independently of the CIA. But the fourth section, just 97 characters, has never been cracked. Not by the NSA. Not by the CIA's own cryptography unit. Not by the artist's original collaborators. The sculptor, Jim Sanborn, has released partial hints over the years just to keep interest alive, and he said he'll reveal the solution before he dies if nobody solves it first. Which, thank you so much Jim, I really appreciate that. I truly cannot even speak about how wild it is that the actual home of American intelligence has an unsolved code sitting in its front yard for over three decades. Isn't that just perfect? I feel like if I worked there, that would drive me absolutely nuts. 1943, Hagleywood, England. Four boys out hunting for bird's nests find a human skull wedged inside a hollowed out witch elm tree. Turns out to be the remains of a woman put into the tree while presumably still alive or shortly after death. Investigators couldn't identify her. No name ever surfaced. And then, this is the part that really gets me, starting in 1944, graffiti started appearing around Birmingham, asking, quote, Who put Bella down the witch elm? Nobody knows who wrote it, or how they knew details about the case that weren't public. Theories range from a Nazi spy ring execution, to a black magic ritual sacrifice, to something far more mundane that just never got solved. Someone out there knew something, that graffiti proves it, and that person is long gone now. Taking the answers with them. June 7th, 1992, Springfield, Missouri. Three women, Susie Streeter, her mother Cheryl Levitt, and Susie's friend Stacey McCall, vanished from Cheryl's house overnight without a trace. The lights were left on, the front door was unlocked, Cheryl's shoes were sitting neatly by her bed, there was no sign of forced entry, no struggle, nothing disturbed. It looked like they just stepped out for a second, and then, nothing. No bodies, ever. No arrests, no confirmed sighting since that night. There have been tips, theories, about a stalker fixated on Susie, theories about organized crime, even a $50,000 reward that sat unclaimed for over three decades. Three women just disappeared from a house with the lights on, and over 30 years, nobody has explained how. Between roughly 1978 and 1992, at least six, some say as many as 11, women, all with red hair, were found with their lives taken along interstate highways across multiple states. Tennessee, Arkansas, West Virginia, Kentucky. Similar age range, similar method, bodies dumped near truck stops and highway rest areas. A few of these victims have actually been identified over the years, including one confirmed through advanced DNA testing as recently as 2018, and there's been more progress since, which is honestly rare good news in a case this old. But here's the part that's never changed. Whoever did this, and investigators have long suspected it could be one person, possibly a long haul trucker given the highway pattern, has never been caught. Never named, never charged, decades later. Some women are still slowly getting their names back one at a time, but the person responsible is still just a theory, a pattern on a map, and nothing more. All right guys, that has been our list for today. Thanks so much for checking it out. I've been your host today, Libby Kozlowski, and I will see you again soon. Bye!