Random Mysteries That We Wish We Knew The Answers To (12 items)

(#11) Ray Gricar
- Politician
In 2005, Ray Gricar, the district attorney of Centre County, PA, vanished off the face of the Earth. He had been DA since 1985 and wanted to retire. He went on a day trip in his Mini Cooper, and that’s the last anyone ever saw or heard of him.

His car was later recovered, as was his laptop, which was found floating in the river with the hard drive removed. There are several theories relating to his disappearance. One conspiracy theory plays on his link to the Jerry Sandusky case. Back then, Gricar chose not to prosecute the longtime Penn State assistant football coach. Sandusky was later convicted on several counts of child abuse. Other theories posit that Gricar took his own life or wanted to start fresh.

Either way, it’s been more than 15 years, and no one knows what happened to Ray Gricar, who was deemed “dead in absentia” in 2011.
(#2) The First Person To Record Motion Images On Film Vanished

The world credits Thomas A. Edison as the inventor of motion film. In reality, Louis Le Prince was the first person to record motion images on film.

Le Prince recorded a series of moving images from the Leeds Bridge in Leeds, England, in October 1888. He also held patents on a 16-lens and a single-lens device long before Edison or the Lumière brothers. On September 16, 1890, Le Prince boarded a train at the Dijon platform. He promised to rejoin his friends in Paris for a return journey to England. He never made it and was never heard from again.

Extensive investigations by the French police and Scotland Yard yielded nothing. His body was never found.
(#1) The Boys Of Yuba County Never Came Home

In 1978, five California men with varying intellectual and mental disabilities went to watch a basketball game and never came home. They all lived with their families. Their mental state was such that they were often called “boys” rather than men, although they were in their 20s and 30s.

Inexplicably, the men drove 70 miles east from the basketball game. Instead of going home, they drove to a mountainous, snow-covered road. There, they abandoned their car and disappeared into the night. Later, a snowstorm caused authorities to call off the search.

In the thaw, authorities found the bodies of Bill Sterling, 29; Jackie Huett, 24; Ted Weiher, 32; and Jack Madruga, 30. The fifth man, Gary Mathias, 25, was still missing. Strangely, Weiher had starved to death in a trailer full of food and with an unlit propane tank heater. The other three bodies were outside. Two of their families were only able to recover bones.

No one knows what happened to the boys of Yuba County and why they perished in the snow. Mathias remains missing.
(#7) The Town Full Of Twins Is Still A Mystery To Science

Linha São Pedro is a tiny German settlement near the city of Cândido Godói in Brazil. It's mostly known for basically bursting with twin births. The amount of twins born here exceeds the national average by more than 10 times, and no one knows why.

There was talk of a Nazi experiment. Argentine historian Jorge Camarasa’s book Mengele: The Angel of Death in South America blames Josef Mengele. Camarasa says that Mengele made frequent trips to Linha São Pedro in the '60s. After that, the incidence of twin births mushroomed.

Scientists disregard this theory, stating that Mengele could not have affected the outcome of twin births.
(#8) The Sea Peoples Were Naval Raiders, But No One Knows Their Identity

From approximately 1400 BCE to 1000 BCE, naval warriors raided Egypt. This was 2,000 years before the Vikings. They came on warships as skilled marauders, and Egypt lived in terror. To date, no one knows the identity of these oceanic raiders.

An inscription written in the 13th century BCE was found in the Egyptian city of Tanis. It proclaims, “They came from the sea in their warships and none could stand against them.”

Historians named them the Sea Peoples, and their identity has long been debated. Some suggest they could be Etruscan or Trojan. Others say Philistine, Mycenaen, Minoan, or even Italian. The raids of the Sea Peoples were one of the major causes of the collapse of the Bronze Age. However, historians can't quite figure out who they actually were.
(#12) The Mystery Of The Phoenix Lights

In 1997, hundreds of people in Arizona, Nevada, and the Mexican state of Sonora saw lights in the sky. The lights first appeared in a V-shape formation, and then as a cluster of stationary lights, spherical in shape.

The US Air Force later claimed the lights were high-intensity flares, and the government has refused to acknowledge any other explanation.