EXPLAINEDCORROBORATED
FILE 0011
The Bloop: An Ocean Monster Story Meets the Ice
A mysterious underwater sound became monster lore. NOAA’s explanation points to the extraordinary noise of Antarctic ice.
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CASE FILES
Unsolved crimes, buried history, government secrets, and the stranger corners of the public record. Read the sources. Follow the questions.
OPENSTRONG
FILE 0001 // Monongahela River near the Homestead Grays and Glenwood bridges, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh’s Ghost Bomber: The B-25 That Vanished in the Mon
The crash is documented. The missing airplane is documented. The secret midnight recovery stories are not.
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COLDSTRONG
FILE 0002 // Northwest Orient Flight 305, Pacific Northwest
D.B. Cooper: The Hijacker Who Jumped Into the Dark
A man calling himself Dan Cooper took $200,000, four parachutes, and a nighttime jump from a Boeing 727. His identity and fate remain unknown.
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OPENVERIFIED
FILE 0003 // Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, Massachusetts
The Gardner Museum Heist: 81 Minutes, 13 Missing Works
Two men dressed as police officers entered a Boston museum after midnight. Eighty-one minutes later, 13 works were gone. They are still missing.
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OPENSTRONG
FILE 0004 // Alcatraz Island, San Francisco, California
Escape From Alcatraz: Did Morris and the Anglins Make It?
The escape route is known. The dummy heads are real. The raft was real. What happened after the men entered San Francisco Bay remains unresolved.
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RESOLVEDVERIFIED
FILE 0005 // United States and associated research sites
MKULTRA: The Conspiracy That Was Actually a Program
“MKULTRA existed” is not a theory. The difficult work is separating documented activity from everything later attached to its name.
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RESOLVEDVERIFIED
FILE 0006 // North Pacific Ocean
Project AZORIAN: The CIA Built a Giant Claw to Steal a Soviet Submarine
The cover story was deep-sea mining. The real mission was to lift part of a Soviet nuclear-armed submarine from more than three miles below the Pacific.
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CLOSEDDISPUTED
FILE 0007 // Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (alleged)
The Philadelphia Experiment: Great Story, Missing Receipts
The legend says the Navy made a destroyer invisible or teleported it in 1943. Navy archives say they repeatedly searched for supporting records and found none.
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OPENSTRONG
FILE 0008 // Ohio State Radio Observatory, near Delaware, Ohio
The Wow! Signal: 72 Seconds That Never Repeated
A powerful narrow-band radio signal passed through the Big Ear telescope in 1977. It looked interesting enough for an astronomer to write “Wow!” on the printout. It has never been reliably detected again.
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RESOLVEDVERIFIED
FILE 0009 // Tunguska region, Siberia, Russia
Tunguska: The Explosion That Flattened a Siberian Forest
An enormous explosion flattened hundreds of square miles of Siberian forest in 1908. The event is real; the modern scientific explanation is far less mysterious than the old legends.
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