The Mystery Report 
Just after 2 a.m. on February 25, 1942, Los Angeles began preparing for an attack. Air-raid sirens sounded across Southern California, the city disappeared beneath a blackout, and military searchlights started sweeping the sky. Something had been detected approaching from the direction of the Pacific, and less than an…
On the night of August 21, 1955, a frightened group of people arrived at the police station in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, with a story that sounded unbelievable. They said strange, small humanoid creatures had been surrounding a farmhouse near the community of Kelly for hours. The family had fired at the figures, watched…
In 1986, workers on the highway between Caracas and Venezuela’s international airport noticed a black patch spreading across the pavement. At first it was only about 50 yards long, the sort of stain that should have disappeared after a cleanup or been traced to a leaking truck. Instead, it grew. Drivers soon knew it…
On the night of April 7, 2017, a woman walking her dog through Chicago’s Oz Park noticed a large black shape near the path ahead. At first, it was simply something standing in the darkness where nothing that size should have been. As she got a better look, she became convinced the figure was looking back at her. She…
For 35 years, 97 encrypted letters carved into a copper sculpture outside CIA headquarters refused to surrender their secret. NSA codebreakers tried, CIA employees tried, and armies of amateur cryptographers built elaborate theories involving clocks, coordinates, hidden directions and mathematical tricks. Computers…
Far beyond Neptune, the solar system stops behaving quite the way astronomers expect. Small frozen worlds travel around the Sun on enormous stretched-out paths, some taking thousands of years to complete a single orbit. A few of the most distant objects seem to point in strangely similar directions, as though…
The road between Carmarthen and Llandeilo was almost completely black on an October night in 2018. Rain smeared across the windshield, the countryside had vanished beyond the headlights, and sometime around 9 p.m. a large animal suddenly exploded out of the vegetation beside the road. The driver had only seconds to…
On October 31, 2008, someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto appeared on a cryptography mailing list with an idea that would eventually shake the financial world. A nine-page paper described Bitcoin, a digital money system that could operate without a bank standing in the middle. A few months later, the network was…
Late on January 20, 2008, a 37-year-old woman named Liu entered an apartment building in Yuanlin, Taiwan, with her 4-year-old daughter. A surveillance camera recorded them stepping into an elevator and riding toward the upper floors, preserving what would become the last confirmed images of the pair. Nothing violent…
In 2019, navigation systems watching traffic along the Texas Gulf Coast began showing something that should not have been possible. Ships still moving normally through familiar waters appeared on tracking screens to swing into strange circles miles offshore, while aircraft routes bent into shapes that did not match…