The human mind loves a good mystery. It's almost impossible to encounter a puzzle and not want to solve it; that's just how our minds work. And while some riddles are very simple, and some are almost impossible, others are simply utterly unexpected and unbelievable. Sometimes the solution turns out to be even stranger than the riddle itself.
10. Irish supercriminal Pravo Jazdi
In the early 2000s, Irish police were swamped with cases of a serial criminal named Pravo Jazdi. They weren't brutal, of course, but they had a complete lack of respect for traffic laws. Jazdi was repeatedly fined across the country for speeding and parking violations. And he got away with it because each time he was caught, he gave the cops a new address and a new alias.
By the time was recordedmore than 50 traffic violations , Irish police began making serious efforts to track down Jazdi and put an end to his reign of terror on the roads.
Eventually, Irish police managed to figure out how Jazdy had evaded them for so long while still somehow committing traffic crimes. That's because there was no one named Prawo Jazdy. Instead, Prawo Jazdy means "driver's license" in Polish, and every time an Irish police officer stopped a Polish driver, they wrote down something incorrect as the driver's name. An officer noticed the problem and then reviewed files over the years to see how often the same mistake was repeated.
Police issued a memo in the hopes of informing officers so they don't make the same mistake in the future.
9. Mysterious night power outages in the village of Ganeshpur.
Few things are more annoying than a power outage, but the village of Ganeshpur, India, had to deal with it regularly, with power outages lasting two to three hours at night. Neighboring towns were fine, and there had never been any bad weather or anything typically associated with citywide outages, so people began to get suspicious. What could cause these short, regular power outages?
Residents became suspicious and began to suspect the local electrician's involvement. So, the next time the power went out, they tracked the man down. local school , where he secretly met his girlfriend under cover of darkness. He regularly cut off the electricity so they could meet without anyone knowing.
The townspeople were less than surprised and apparently beat the man, then shaved his head, and then forced to marry to his girlfriend.
8. How Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess
When you're a chess champion, people expect certain things from you. Or at least one thing, and that's the ability to win at chess. When it came to chess, Garry Kasparov was long considered the best of the best, and when IBM invented the computer Deep Blue, capable of playing chess at a professional level, some doubts arose about whether the machine could surpass the man considered invincible. Kasparov himself said that he will lose Not Maybe. But he did.
Deep Blue made a move that confused and delighted many observers in the middle of the game, on move 44. The computer moved the rook . And there was no reason for this.
In reality, this move was neither offensive nor defensive. For most, it was meaningless. Some strategists saw it as the opening salvo of a long-term strategy, the sacrifice of a minor piece as a kind of defensive maneuver within an attack. And people generally agree that Kasparov was frightened by it. He couldn't understand the computer's intentions. There were even suggestions that the human master had interfered.
Kasparov won that first round, but then lost the second game, drew the next three, and then lost the sixth, allowing the computer to claim the overall victory.
Years later, one of Big Blue's designers said that the move that confused Kasparov was nothing more than a mistake. The computer didn't know what to do because the mistake prevented it from choosing the best move, so it chose the default move—random. But this confused Kasparov enough, leading him to believe the computer was much smarter than it actually was, that he never recovered.
7. The Extraordinarily Long Life of Pierre Joubert
The world is fascinated by the extremely long-lived, so when it turned out that To Pierre Joubert 113 years old—that was a hell of a feat. And that was back in 1814! His age was authenticated by Canadian government census takers, and it was considered real. So how did a man turn 113 in 1814? Well, he didn't.
It turns out Pierre's father was also named Pierre. They mixed up the documents when determining the younger boy's age, and he and his father were made into the same person. His father was born in 1701 but died when he was 65 years old . The younger Joubert was born in 1732, meaning he would have died at 82. Which is old, of course. But it's definitely not 113.
6. The mother who failed the pregnancy test
You don't often hear about a woman failing a pregnancy test, but it can happen. And you might assume that means the woman was faking the mother. That's what Lydia Fairchild went through in 2002. She applied for welfare, which required proof that all family members were related. But her DNA test showed that her children weren't hers. She was accused of fraud, and she nearly lost children . But she knew they were hers.
It turns out Fairchild was genetic chimera . Her mother likely had two fertilized eggs that would have created fraternal twins, but one absorbed the other, resulting in the second set of genetic material ending up inside Fairchild's body. As a result, she was able to prove her case in court and keep her children.
5. Simultaneous explosion of dozens of sea mines near Vietnam
In 1972, in the water off the coast of Vietnam exploded at the same time dozens of sea mines . Pilots in the area saw nothing that could have triggered the mines, but the sheer number of mines exploding simultaneously indicated something large must have been involved. The cause remained a complete mystery for many years.
Fast forward to 2018, and scientists have found an explanation. These naval mines relied on magnets as part of their trigger mechanism, allowing them to attach to the hulls of boats and detonate. A sufficiently powerful solar storm could have interfered with the magnetic triggers, causing them all to detonate simultaneously.
Research shows that there was a disturbance in the days leading up to the explosions. increased solar activity , and other countries also suffered from magnetic interference. The military even suggested a solar storm as the cause before burying their research.
4. The Mysterious Tomato from Surtsey
One of the remarkable things about a volcanic island is that if you explore a newly formed island, you're literally discovering new land. This is nearly impossible to do these days. So, when scientists got to it in 1969, volcanic island , which had only been around for a few years at the time, you can imagine there was some excitement. And that turned into serious confusion when a tomato plant was discovered there.
A handful of scientists discovered a plant that wasn't grown there and called Ágúst Bjarnason, whose job it was to observe vegetation on an island southeast of Iceland. He arrived and noticed that it resembled a tomato, but it couldn't be one, as the two-year-old island couldn't have native tomatoes.
Bjarnason continued his investigation, moving rocks to discover a tomato growing from something soft , which he then poked before realizing what had happened. The scientist on the island had at some point eaten some tomatoes and then gone to the bathroom in the same spot. The semen had passed undamaged through their digestive tract and managed to pass through, and Bjarnason had just poked a pile of poop. He collected it all and left.
3. The Mysterious Smoke Alarm That Shot Down a 747
Airborne emergencies are especially unpleasant. You never want to be on a plane when something goes wrong that puts people's safety at risk. So, when a Boeing 747 en route from Sydney, Australia, to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, encountered a mysterious accumulation of smoke in the cargo compartment, the pilots, for obvious reasons, had to accept it for an emergency landing.
The plane landed in Bali after a smoke alarm went off. The alarm came from the cargo hold, where the plane was carrying colossal quantities of 2186 sheep . When authorities began their investigation, no fire was found, and it turned out that smoke hadn't triggered the alarm. Instead, the airline discovered that if you seal over 2,000 sheep in a poorly ventilated metal tube, the methane from their farts can be volatile enough to set off the fire alarm, and that's exactly what happened.
It took several hours to effectively clear the air and get the plane ready for flight again.
2. Blue honey produced by French bees
If you truly love honey, you know it comes in many different varieties. From clover honey to buckwheat honey to manuka honey, and so on. These varieties are the result of honeybees collecting nectar from different plant species, and the end result can have noticeable differences in color and flavor. But these variations are usually not very dramatic, and the color differences range from light yellow to dark yellow and brown.
When bees in France began producing blue honey , This was certainly a mystery, as bees historically haven't done this. Honey began appearing in 2014 in Alsace, and there were some concerns that pesticides or other chemicals might be to blame.
Beekeepers and other researchers had to explore the area and were able to locate the source approximately 2.5 miles from where the apiaries were located. A waste processing plant Mars plant , in this case the colorful shells of old M&Ms, were raided by bees, who feasted on the candy shells and ended up producing colorful, but completely unsaleable, honey.
1. The tempo of Beethoven's manuscript music is too fast
Musicologists and historians have puzzled over the tempo of Beethoven's music for years. The tempo markings on his sheet music don't really have much meaning, and many people ignore them. Almost half of his 135 original notes recorded at such a strange tempo that most people consider it simply wrong.
How could one of history's greatest musicians be so masterful at composing and writing music yet so completely screw up his own tempo? After years of research, the answer seems to be that Beethoven didn't screw up his tempo; the metronome did. For example, his metronome likely simply broke, or he simply misread it.
Part of this problem probably arose from the fact that metronomes didn't exist when Beethoven began writing music. But after their invention, he liked the idea so much that he went back and added tempo marks to his old symphonies, and they seem to make no sense at all, indicating that the music should be too fast. If the metronome had been turned off, or Beethoven simply didn't understand how to read the relatively new invention, his tempo markings would be meaningless, which is apparently the case.