Still Unexplained

In March 1966, colored lights hovered over a marsh behind a women’s dormitory at Hillsdale College in Michigan, the night after a farm family near Dexter reported something glowing in their swamp. When Air Force astronomer J. Allen Hynek blamed swamp gas, the country laughed, the witnesses were furious, and Congressman Gerald Ford demanded a real investigation. The man who said “swamp gas” would spend the rest of his life acting like he’d gotten it wrong. So what was really over that marsh?

On Valentine’s Day 1945, seventy-four-year-old Charles Walton went out to trim hedges on Meon Hill near Lower Quinton, Warwickshire, and never came home. He was found pinned to the earth with his own pitchfork, and the murder of Charles Walton became known as England’s witchcraft killing. Scotland Yard’s most famous detective had a prime suspect, the village had its whispers about toads and black dogs, and the official file tells a very different story than the legend does. Eighty years later, M

The death of Edgar Allan Poe is one of American history’s strangest unsolved cases. In October 1849, the author was found delirious outside a Baltimore polling place in clothes that weren’t his, after six days nobody can account for, and he died four days later without ever explaining what happened. Election gangs, a rewritten letter, a hospital doctor whose story kept changing, and a name Poe shouted over and over in his last nights. Nearly two centuries later, the questions are still open.

The Flannan Isles Lighthouse mystery is one of Scotland's most haunting unsolved cases. In December 1900, three keepers vanished from a remote island in the Outer Hebrides, leaving the station tidy, the lamp ready to light, and one man's coat still hanging on its peg. The official report blamed the sea. The people who knew that island best had never trusted it in the first place.

The Socorro Incident is one of the most credible UFO cases in American history. In April 1964, Socorro, New Mexico police sergeant Lonnie Zamora abandoned a speeding chase to investigate a roar and a flame in the sky, and found a white, egg-shaped craft and two small figures in a desert gully. What he left behind was more than a story: marks in the ground, burned brush that was cool to the touch, independent witnesses, and a case the Air Force's own UFO program could never close.

President Kennedy's brain went missing from a locked federal archive sometime after his 1963 assassination, and no one has ever been able to fully explain how or why. In 1966, when investigators finally opened the footlocker meant to contain it, along with tissue slides and paraffin blocks from the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital, they found nothing but paperwork inside. What follows is a tangle of contradictory witness testimony, a photographer who denies the National Archives photos are his