AskReaders: What are some weird, real life X-files type mysteries?

Sometime ago we asked our regular contributors through e-mail, What are some weird, real life X-files type mysteries? We got many interesting response. Here are some of them. We have just copied and pasted their responses, not editing them in any way and most of the respondents have requested to stay anonymous, so no names will be published.

1-5 Real Life X-files Type Mysteries

01. This account of a force field spontaneously appearing in a 3M facility, supposedly generated by static electricity from the films they were working with, but at a strength that would require insane levels of potential difference concentrated to one area for no discernible reason.

02. The Dyatlov Pass Incident. 9 Soviet students disappeared while hiking in the Ural Mountains. That in itself isn’t particularly weird, apart from extremely unusual findings when the camp and bodies were finally located. Some of the bodies had signs of extreme trauma or were mutilated in ways that couldn’t be explained by the normal hazards associated with the terrain. Most of the students had died of hypothermia, despite being experienced in winter hiking and so presumably knowing better than to leave the tent.

There’s a bunch of conspiracy theories about what caused them to rip the tent open from the inside (there didn’t appear to have been an avalanche), flee in various states of undress and what could have caused the injuries. They range from the Soviet military using the area as a testing ground for weapons to the hikers having stumbled upon a yeti. The official investigation found that the hikers had been killed by an “unknown, compelling force.”

03. Studying Cold War Submarine history is always full of mysteries. Like what did the USS Parche do that made it the most decorated submarine in the history of the Navy? Seriously, 9 Presidential Unit Citations? Also what did the USS Narwhal do and why was its construction so different from other subs?

04. The Eilean Mor Lighthouse. Yes there are a few logical reasons for this to occur. This is the idea of almost every X-Files episode: A logical and paranormal explanation for the same event.

05. The death of Gloria Ramirez. She was admitted to the emergency department Riverside General Hospital with symptoms related to advanced-stage cervical cancer she battled with. After some standard medication and defibrillation, a nurse drew her blood and strong ammonia-like smell came from the syringe. Medical staff started to faint and within few minutes 23 out of 37 medical staff were exposed to some kind of gas/chemical/something. 5 were hospitalized, 1 spent two weeks in intensive care.

No conclusive explanation has ever been put forward. There are few good theories, but nothing more. What makes this so interesting for me is the fact that this happened under the watch of 37 medical professionals, many of whom were experienced doctors and scientists. This is not a vague story of something that may have happened somewhere under bad light with layperson witnesses.

These guys were professionals and scientists, and conditions were tightly controlled and well known and they have no idea what happened.

6-10 Real Life X-files Type Mysteries

06. The insatiable Tarrare, a Frenchman who could not stop eating. He was said to have an incredibly large mouth with stained teeth, and supposedly had a visible vapor rising off of his body. His parents kicked him out as a teenager because he was literally eating them out of house and home. He ate any and everything, including live animals, stones, silverware, anything he could get his hands on. The French military even tried employing him as a courier to smuggle documents by eating them. No doctor was able to find a cause or a cure to his appetite. He was eventually kicked out of the military hospital where they were studying him, after falling under suspicion of eating a 14 month old child that went missing from the same hospital. A reasonable suspicion, since they caught him trying to eat dead bodies in the morgue on several occasions.

07. The Oakville Blobs. Gelatinous blobs fell from the sky in Oakville, WA in the early 90’s that made people sick and killed some animals. After testing it was shown to contain human white blood cells.

08. The Glico-Morinaga Incident, also known as the Monster with 21 Faces Case. Surprisingly the wiki is pretty much all of the info you can find online. It seems as if the company has blacked out all leaks of info and is controlling what the public knows about the event. It is truly the most interesting case I’ve ever come across. A President of a huge food company taken hostage and getting away, whole batches of sweets laced with cyanide, the investigating detective killing himself for not solving it. It seems hard to believe that it could happen and no one has any idea who did it? I’ve heard a gang from a small island could be behind it.

09. The Green Children of Woolpit. Two children, a brother and sister, mysteriously appeared. They claimed to have been from a dark world and were drawn to ours by a bell. Also, they were green.

10. The Hessdalen lights. Numerous sightings of the lights but no explanation yet as far I know.

11-15 Real Life X-files Type Mysteries

11. The Kelly-Hopkinsville Encounter. A bunch of people dealt with a two hour attack by strange little men in the dark woods of Kentucky in 1955.

12. The distinctly Irish mystery of the great Horse, Shergar. Shergar was a national hero and his kidnapping involves an alleged government conspiracy, the IRA, and the breeding of a potential horse master race.

13. UFO encounters occurring at US military facilities is an interesting one to examine, where in some cases at the time of the UFO sightings, American conventional and nuclear missile systems mysteriously malfunctioned and shut down, with no credible reasoning or explanation given for these sudden failures.

Sounds pretty crazy, right? Well, there is in fact quite a bit of official documentation and eyewitness reports from a bunch of quite credible military officials and contractors to back up many of these apparent close encounter UFO incidents that took place at or around various secure military facilities and missile systems over the years.

Here is an example highlighting one bit of testimony of an incident that occurred at Maelstrom USAF base (Montana) in 1967, in which 10 Minuteman nuclear missiles apparently mysteriously went offline when a UFO was reported by multiple individuals around the facility. Here is a brief video describing some of the testimony of this incident, and again, there were multiple eyewitnesses involved who have gone on the record about this UFO encounter.

The 1980 “Rendlesham_Forest_incident” is another well publicized and very interesting case which took place in England at the twin NATO air base facilities of RAF Woodbridge and RAF Bentwaters, and has plenty of official documentation to support that something very bizarre happened that night.

During a nuclear missile test (using a dummy warhead aboard) that was flown out of Vandenburg AFB in California in 1964, there was another close encounter incident where a UFO was apparently caught on film. In this case, known as the “Big Sur Incident”, the UFO was apparently seen on film rendezvousing with the missile in flight, orbiting it while the missile was traveling some 8000 miles per hour downrange towards Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific, with the UFO shooting what was described as “beams of light” at the missile, resulting in the destruction of the booster and dummy warhead payload.

If you want to read a really interesting and quite well-researched book about this subject matter that contains these and plenty more case studies of different incidents, including declassified documentation and eyewitness testimony from people who have gone on the record about this topic, I highly suggest giving “UFOs and Nukes” by author Robert Hastings a look.

14. For a mystery very close to the X-Files, you’d need to look at something like the Paul Bennewitz case. He lived and worked close to the Kirtland Airforce base and intercepted what he believed to be alien communications at what he called the Dulce Base. He very well may have been the target of a government operation where he was fed false information and documents verifying his alien hypothesis by intelligence agents working for the Airforce Office of Special Investigations.

He was pushed to the brink and ended up in a mental health hospital, and his story is full of X-Files-esque intrigue like photographs of landed UFOs he took from the air (he was a private pilot) being stolen from his house. There have been a few books written about it, the best being Project Beta by Greg Bishop.

15. Edward Leedskalnin was a 5-foot tall dude who mined and sculpted 1,000,000 kg of coral in south Florida into a home and attraction. He had a 40,000 pound piece balancing on an axle as a door, that you could push open with one finger. When it needed repair they needed a crane to fix it. He installed it by himself. He never worked when he could be seen, never told the secret, and no one’s figured it out. He said he knew the secret of the Egyptians regarding moving heavy objects.

16-20 Real Life X-files Type Mysteries

16. In 1970, a group of hikers came across the corpse of a woman in the middle of Isdalen Valley in Norway. Around her were bottles of liquor, sleeping pills and nearly incinerated passports. Additionally, her fingerprints were sanded off. She was later linked to some suitcases found at a train station, but the labels in her clothes had all been removed. They also found a diary with coded entries. Later investigation revealed that she had traveled throughout Europe under false names, spoke multiple languages and switched hotels frequently. Her identity has never been discovered, but the most common theory is that the Isdal Woman, as she’s come to be known for, was a spy of some sort.

17. I’ve been trying to find out more information about this story for about 3 years now. As the story goes in 1996 there were 2 small “creatures” found in a sludge pit at a GM plant in Anderson Indiana. People were seeing something swimming/moving in this pit which was a concrete storage pool for leftover toxic chemicals. The pit was drained and they found two similar creatures. They were roughly the size of a glove. Each had an eye and some tentacles for swimming. The creatures were placed in jars and majority of workers at that plant got a chance to look at it. The following day they were taken for testing by some “government agency” and the story changed and everyone was told they were not creatures. A lot of people at the plant saw these creatures. The story was relayed to me by a co-worker I used to work night-shift with. He is an Anderson native his entire life and isn’t really the conspiracy theory type. I tried to find a link for you guys but all I found was this article.

18. The Hoia Baciu forest in Romania. Visitors to the forest often report intense feelings of anxiety and the feeling of being constantly watched. Moreover, the local vegetation is somehow bizarre in appearance, like something out of a make-believe story with strangely shaped trees, and unexplained charring on tree stumps and branches.

The forest was named after a shepherd that disappeared in the area with a flock of two hundred sheep. Most people who live near the forest are afraid to enter it due to the stories and legends that have been handed down. They believe that those who visit the site will never return back home. Many of the locals who have been brave enough to venture into the forest complained of physical harm, including rashes, nausea, vomiting, migraines, burns, scratches, anxiety, and other unusual sensations.

19. Elisa Lam. She was a student staying at a hotel in California. The hotel’s security camera footage caught her standing in an elevator (which appeared to be malfunctioning), looking as though she was hiding from someone at times and generally acting strangely at other times.

Her body was found in the hotel’s rooftop water tank two weeks later.

There’s some evidence that she killed herself- she was bipolar and her body had no evidence of physical trauma. On the other hand, she was found in the water tank with the lid closed and propped up by concrete blocks. Her phone was also nowhere to be found after her death.

As a bonus creepy fact, her body was not discovered until the hotel’s guests began complaining that the water tasted weird and was black.

20. Not much for storytelling, but here goes: I was among the first wave of Americans going into Baghdad in April-June 2003 and one night the first week, we were on patrol in a neighborhood, and some of the residents tell us that they hear screams coming through their water pipes. They said that there was a jail nearby and every day, someone would come and bring food and water, even though the jail was supposedly empty. Underneath the jail Saddam was supposedly doing experiments of some kind. The person bringing the food to the jail stopped coming about a week previous. We get to the jail, and there’s a freshly poured pad of concrete about the size of a stairwell. We start taking turns mauling the sh*t out of it, trying to break it up with our hooligan kit. Some of the neighborhood men join in. All night long we’re mauling away and don’t really make much of a dent in it (surprising because concrete everywhere else in the country sucks). The next morning, we get relieved by another unit and get orders to go some place else. No discussion or update on whatever happened/did not happen at the place. I always wondered if they got into the basement of that jail and if they found anything. It’s hard to put the feeling into words, but all of us to a man felt something was not right about that place. None of us could sleep that night, we just stayed awake, either providing security on post or mauling away.

21-25 Real Life X-files Type Mysteries

21. The creepy case of the letters.  Circleville is a small city in Ohio that has a population of over 13,000. Its biggest event is the annual Circleville Pumpkin Show. It is also the home of a mysterious letter writer known as the Circleville Letter Writer.

Starting in 1976 residents of Circleville began receiving mysterious, vindictive letters. Thousands of letters, written in block letters were sent to city officials and even normal citizens. One recipient of the letters was school bus driver Mary Gillespie. She received letters accusing her of having an extra-martial affair with a school official. On August 19, 1977 Mary’s husband Ron Gillispie received a phone call seeming to indicate the identity of the writer. He left his house with his gun to confront the writer. He was found dead a short distance from his house. His car was driven off the road and his gun had been fired once. He died as a result of the crash and it is unknown why he fired the gun. It is unclear if it was an accident or murder. Later, while driving her bus, Mary saw signs along her route harassing her. She went to take one down and discovered a booby-trap meant to fire a gun at her. The gun belonged to her former brother-in-law Paul Freshour.

Freshour was convicted of attempted murder and was thought to be the Circleville writer. However, while incarcerated the letters continued despite him being in solitary confinement without access to letter writing material and his mail being monitored. He was denied parole because of the letters and received one himself after his parole was denied.

22. Radio astronomer here! A lot of people have by now heard about the Wow! signal, particularly if you hang out a lot here, but there are many other strange signals we’ve heard from the sky we can’t explain. One cool example is The Great Galactic Burper. In short, back in 1998 radio astronomers pointed towards the galactic center heard five loud bursts of radiation, that were ten minutes long or so with 77 minutes separating the blasts. It was really weird, no one knows what caused it, and no one has ever heard this or a similar burst ever again.

23. The Mary Celeste was an American merchant brigantine that was found adrift and deserted in the Atlantic Ocean, off the Azores Islands, Portugal, on December 4, 1872, by the Canadian brigantine Dei Gratia. She was in a disheveled but seaworthy condition, under partial sail, with no one on board, and her lifeboat missing. The last log entry was dated ten days earlier. She had left New York City for Genoa on November 7, and on discovery was still amply provisioned. Her cargo of denatured alcohol was intact, and the captain’s and crew’s personal belongings were undisturbed. None of those who had been on board—the captain and his wife, their two-year-old daughter, and the crew of seven—were ever seen or heard from again

24. Ursula and Sabina Eriksson are Swedish twins who supposedly went totally batsh*t crazy together for roughly 72 hours. Here is a footage (and subsequently a whole documentary) of them repeatedly throwing themselves into oncoming traffic and getting hit/run over by multiple cars and even an 18-wheeler. When police arrived to sort things out, they became extremely violent like cornered animals, eventually leading them to need restraints just to administer medical attention.

One was charged with assaulting a police officer when she was released from the hospital (a span of a few hours), to which she responded apathetically or even cheerfully. After something like 2 days in a holding cell, she plead guilty and was sentenced 1 day (which she already served) and was released.

Something like a day later, some guy found her wandering around the street looking lost/confused. He invited her in to let her use his phone and try to track down the sister (who was still in the hospital, I believe), and she apparently stabbed the guy 3-4 times in the chest, killing him.

I say “apparently” because all the evidence suggested that it was her, but she never actually gave her account of what happened. She answered every question with “no comment” from the moment of arrest throughout the trial.

To top the whole thing off, doctors at the trial declared that she was insane when she committed the crime, but that she was now completely sane, and was not currently a risk to the public. The judge wanted to give her an indefinite sentence, so they would have more time to evaluate the possibility of it happening again. The law, however, required that he give her a definite sentence, since she was declared to not currently be a risk to the public. He sentenced her to 5 years in prison.

She was released in 2011 and has essentially fallen of the map since then. We know that she kept in contact with her twin through her sentence, and that they likely reunited upon release, somewhere in America.

25. The monkey man would have made a great episode. In May 2001, reports began to circulate in the Indian capital New Delhi of a strange monkey-like creature that was appearing at night and attacking people. Eyewitness accounts were often inconsistent, but tended to describe the creature as about four feet (120 cm) tall, covered in thick black hair, with a metal helmet, metal claws, glowing red eyes and three buttons on its chest; others, however, described the Monkey-man as having a more vulpine snout, and being up to eight feet tall, and muscular; it would leap from building to building like a parkour enthusiast. Still others have described it as a bandaged figure or as a helmeted thing. Theories on the nature of the Monkey Man ranged from an Avatar of the Hindu god Hanuman, to an Indian version of Bigfoot.

Many people reported being scratched, and two (by some reports, three) people even died when they leapt from the tops of buildings or fell down stairwells in a panic caused by what they thought was the attacker. At one point, exasperated police even issued artist’s impression drawings in an attempt to catch the creature.

The entire incident has been described as an example of mass hysteria.