People love unsolved mysteries. I mean, it’s a whole, popular television series and everything!

That said, what people love more is answers to those mysteries…at least, most of the time.

Sometimes the answers must not be interesting enough to stick, like in these cases, when people seem to have forgotten they exist at all.

Boring.

How to make gold from lead.

Hundreds of years the alchemists tried it unsuccessfully. Today it is possible using a particle accelerator.

However, it is far from cost efficient – mining gold is orders of magnitudes cheaper.

Nothing to see here.

Bermuda Triangle turns out to have the expected number of mishaps at sea given the amount of shipping that traverses it.

And nothing mysterious in that region since use of GPS became common

We’ve all seen the movie.

Whether the Titanic sank in one piece or not.

Many discounted those survivors who said they saw her split in two because they had a hard time believing such a mighty ship could rip apart like that.

It wasn’t until Ballard and his crew found her that the truth was revealed.

We want to believe.

They found the remains of the entire Romanov family, so Anastasia did not survive.

Neither did any member of Nicholas II’s immediate family.

My understanding is that they found her remains and then checked her DNA against that of a living prince who was the closest living cousin to donate their DNA.

They were there all along.

The rediscoveries of lost cities such as:

The rediscovery of the location of Pompeii in 1748.

The rediscovery of the location of Herculaneum in 1709.

The discovery of the location of Machu Picchu in 1911.

It’s just the wind.

The mysterious trails of rocks at Racetrack Playa” in Death Valley National Park, California.

For many years, the cause of these mysterious rock movements was unknown. However, in recent years, scientists have discovered that the rocks move due to a combination of wind and ice.

During periods of rain or melting snow, water freezes into thin sheets of ice on the surface of the lake bed. When the ice breaks apart, it can be moved by wind, and as the ice sheets move, they push the rocks along with them, leaving behind the distinctive trails.

Bless his soul.

The Boy in the Box has been identified as Joseph Augustus Zarelli, although his homicide is still an open investigation.

Not an underwater alien.

The “bloop” sound that was recorded in the Pacific Ocean that baffled scientists was finally found to be an icequake.

I have a silly and weird feeling of sadness knowing this is no longer a mystery. It’s been one for so long!

Next you’ll tell me the “Wow!” Signal was just space dust…

Totally gory.

How cat(er)pillars become butterflies. When I was 12 I wanted to go university to be the first person to discover how they do it.

(Once catapillars have a cocoon, they secrete an enzyme that turns them into a puddle of stem cell filled goop and then that becomes a butterfly)

They weren’t missing him.

There was one (maybe not that widely known) about a guy who was found to have committed suicide in a Motel in Washington or Oregon. No ID, no idea who it was, strange note crumpled in the garbage that just said “suicide”.

No one ever came forward to say they knew him based on his picture in papers. Was on all the “unknown person” forums, even here on reddit. Just one of those cases that was interesting to me. And, after many years, they used the DNA family matching thing and found his family.

His family just thought he just went off and was living his life.

Still fascinating.

I scrolled far too long and didn’t find anyone mentioning it but — the Zodiac Cipher was finally cracked.

Iirc from their YouTube video, the reason it took so long for people to crack it was because it was riddled with spelling errors – indicating that the Zodiac Killer was probably undereducated or had a learning disability of some kind.

After all these years, it’s still fascinating to read about the Zodiac, specifically the hidden identity of this person. There’s a strong chance they’re dead now, but I hope we learn who it was.

Just overexposure.

The Solway Firth Spaceman became popular in ufology as it supposedly showed a mysterious figure in the background.

For 50 years no one quite knew what it really was till someone analysed the photo and concluded it was actually the mother who accidentally walked into the photo.

The reason she looked like a spaceman was because of overexposure.

What’s most interesting about this was that it was super obvious when you saw all the other photos taken that day, I think there’s one literally a few seconds before or after the spaceman pic with the mother standing in almost the same spot.

Well that’s a nightmare.

The location of Larry Ely Murillo-Moncada. Missing since 2009, his remains were found in a former No Frills Supermarket in Council Bluffs, Iowa. He apparently had fallen in a 18-inch gap between shelves and coolers, and no one heard his screams.

In the movies.

The Lady of the Dunes was an unidentified woman who had been murdered and left in the dunes of Provincetown, Massachusetts.

What made her murder unique besides being a cold case for years was one theory about who she was. Stephen King’s son noticed a woman in the movie Jaws that looked identical to the lady of the dunes, and Jaws was filmed near the area too.

However, she has recently been identified as Ruth Marie Terry. They believe her husband murdered her as he had a criminal record with his past wives beforehand.

Not romantic.

Elisa Lam, the woman found dead in the water tank on top of a hotel in Los Angeles. It wasn’t a murder or ghost, she was mentally ill having a bipolar episode.

She decided to go off her medication and started to believe that she was being followed. Most likely she thought she would be safe in the tank, so she climbed in but couldn’t get out and died of hypothermia. Definitely not ghosts or conspiracy, just unfortunate circumstances.

They had to have figured.

A man in Florida fooled people for years into believing there was a giant penguin walking the beaches, the haox began in 1958 and was only revealed to be a hoax in 1988.

Are we sure, though?

That stranded cosmonaut recording is 99% likely to be a hoax.

Many have discredited if the brother’s technology was even capable of picking up the signal of a Cosmonaut who’s drifted off course, but the real smoking gun is that the woman in the audio recording is speaking in broken Russian.

The two brothers who “picked up the signal” had a sister who was currently learning Russian which would explain the limited vocabulary and pronunciation issues that skeptics have pointed out.

Just a message.

STENDEC plane crash

Late 1940s a British plane flying in South America sent out the message in morse code 3 times STENDEC then vanished.

Found in the 90s to have crashed underpowered into the side of a mountain and burried in a glacier.

It was a huge UFO conspiracy theory for years.

And the mysterious message was most likely a generic message for the airport they were headed to, only mistranscribed at the time

Some of these even surprised me!

I’m off to do some internet digging…