These modern-day, puzzling mysteries, being them hidden codes, eerie broadcasts, or cryptic messages, have raised a lot of eyebrows in their time. If you can’t help the feeling that the world is full of puzzles just waiting to be solved, you are the perfect audience for this piece. Enjoy!
1. Cicada 3301
This one was an annual online puzzle “contest” involving cryptography, steganography, and various other complex challenges. There were, and still are, a LOT of theories, with many being convinced a huge international secret society was behind all of it. And the purpose? To recruit codebreakers from the public. And then we have the side that claims this was more of a cult or religion. Pick your sides, nothing has been proved yet.
2. The Max Headroom signal hijacking
This happened on November 22, 1987, during the broadcast of two television stations in Chicago, Illinois. On one station they were showing the news while on the second one it was airing Dr. Who. Suddenly, an unknown person wearing a Max Headroom mask appeared on screens for about 25 seconds. As in the case above, both the identity of the hijacker and the motive behind the incident remain a mystery.
3. Webdriver Torso
We would expect that the guys at Google know a thing or two about how to become viral. Well, this little experiment kinda backfired because people do what they do best, start all kinds of conspiracy theories. Webdriver Torso is a YouTube channel that gained a ton of attention back in 201 due to its strange content, a series of videos featuring blue and red rectangles that played beeping sounds. It was one of those puzzling mysteries up until Google cleared it out. It turns out the purpose for this channel was more mundane than you might think, with Google later revealing it was its own testing channel.
4. John Titor, the time traveler
In the early 2000s, a user claiming to be a time traveler named John Titor and having the handle TimeTravel_0 appeared on online forums. He was quick to claim he was an American military time traveler from the year 2036. Not only that, but he described a future dystopia and made predictions about upcoming events, events that would include a global nuclear war. The guy even talked about the time machine he used to get back in time, a “stationary mass, temporal displacement unit powered by two top-spin, dual positive singularities”. Hoax or not, the identity of the man behind this elaborate scheme is still unknown.
5. The Toynbee Tiles
TTT as they were soon referred to, were mysterious, cryptic messages embedded in asphalt on roads in 20+ US cities and four South American cities. The tiles referenced resurrecting the dead on planet Jupiter and were often accompanied by strange conspiracy theories. The modus operandi was simple: they used linoleum floor panels which were carved using a knife and filled in with different colors. Under each tile they placed layers of tar paper so after a car drove over it it would effectively glue it to the pavement. This will probably remain one of those puzzling mysteries for a long time…
6. Lake City Quiet Pills Reddit mystery
More puzzling mysteries? This mystery kicked off on Reddit when a user named ReligionOfPeace (RoP) died in 2009. It seems RoP, possibly named Milo, ran a sketchy website full of crude jokes and lewd content. After his death, a Reddit user called 2-6 posted about it and included some weird, cryptic messages. When the Sherlock Holmes of the internet went through the HTML code, they soon discovered one weird thing after another, the following sentence included “Shade is maintaining the calendar and access to the filedump. Angel has the job postings for EU and asia. We aren’t sending anyone to ME. No one. Don’t ask for listings..”
Some saw these messages as a way to organize logistics for secretive activities, which made people think Milo and his ‘buddies” might have been involved in mercenary work or other shady stuff. The whole thing turned into a weird internet rabbit hole, with users being baffled as to what the purpose of it all really was. And if you want to go on even more rabbit holes have you got something for you! Here’s a cool, strange and fun list of weird things to search on Google (and yes, people search for these things all the time!).
7. A858’s Cryptic Reddit Posts
It’s 2011 and out of nowhere a reddit user named A858DE45F56D9BC9, or A858 for short, posts strange hexadecimal sequences on Reddit, on a daily basis. This captured the attention of so many people that it soon became an internet sensation. Heck, even today some people still engage in finding the meaning or the culprit behind this account.
8. The Bloop
In 1997, a creepy underwater sound, nicknamed “The Bloop,” was recorded in the Pacific Ocean. And that was the cue for people to start unraveling weird conspiracy theories, from giant sea creatures to secret military operations. It was later revealed that the sound was in fact just an ice quake.
9. Puzzling Mysteries: The Marina Joyce Mystery
This is a really odd one. Marina Joyce, a Youtuber from London, sparked concern among her followers due to changes in her behavior and the occasional cryptic messages shared in her videos. Isis, drug-related offenses, her fans went through it all, thinking even of a potential kidnapping. That led to The Scotland Yard being involved and the hashtag #SaveMarinaJoyce had hundreds of thousands of retweets. Her way of clearing things up surely didn’t help: “I can’t tell you what happened, but I am okay and I really do love you guys.” So, naturally, people didn’t believe a word she was saying and kept making up tons of theories. Recently she revealed she’s been suffering from MS since 2016.
This was our list of puzzling mysteries that should probably get their very own Netflix series. We know there are MANY others out there and we’d love to hear them from you. What’s your favorite mystery that keeps you up at night?
