THE PLACES BEHIND THE FILES // 6 MAPPED LOCATIONS
The trail runs through river towns, museum galleries, and places with unfinished stories. Search by place or case to see where each file leads. Pins identify supported locations; claims within each story carry their own source assessments.
Choose a story card to explore its location.
Monongahela River near the Homestead Grays and Glenwood bridges, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
The crash is documented. The missing airplane is documented. The secret midnight recovery stories are not.
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, Massachusetts
Two men dressed as police officers entered a Boston museum after midnight. Eighty-one minutes later, 13 works were gone. They are still missing.
Alcatraz Island, San Francisco, California
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.
Ohio State Radio Observatory, near Delaware, Ohio
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.
Tunguska region, Siberia, Russia
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.
Chicago, Illinois
In 1987, someone overpowered the broadcast signals of two Chicago TV stations with a bizarre Max Headroom impersonation. The identity of the pirate was never publicly established.
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Follow the place. Read the record. Pins identify supported story locations. Follow each Case File for its evidence, sources and unanswered questions.
MAPPING STANDARD
Each pin needs a supported location: a site, city, or region relevant to the file. Placing a story on the map does not establish every claim in it. Source labels—Verified, Corroborated, Mixed, Unverified, or Disputed—describe the available evidence.
