As a child, I used to think history was a really boring subject. The history text books used to always put me to sleep and I just couldn’t get myself interested in it. I used to wonder what the point was to learn all that stuff.

Fast forward many years, and now I feel like history is just beyond fascinating. It literally tells you about all the series of events that took place for things to be exactly the way they are.

But there is another facet to history which is that it is riddled with unsolved mysteries, some of which will perhaps always remain unsolved and it just intensifies its interestingness even more.

Today I want to talk about some of these unsolved mysteries that I was reading about just the other day, and found them really engrossing.

The Voynich Manuscript

From Wikimedia Commons.

The Voynich Manuscript is perhaps the most mysterious book in the world and dates back more than 500 years. It is written in a language that no one understands and by an unknown author. There are several things that make it way more interesting than other mysterious texts of history.

For one, most of the pages in this book have puzzling illustrations of plants, astronomical objects like sun, moon, stars, circular diagrams, medicinal herbs and recipes of some sort. To add to the mystery, most of the illustrations of plants and herbs have not been identified in the real world.

Next come the actual text with which the book is written. Many prominent cryptographers in history have tried to decode the text but no one has been able to decipher it so far. There have been claims by many people of doing so, but no one has translated even a meaningful amount.

Today, no one knows the purpose of this book, or the actual origin. Many have suggested that this might be a hoax but several others think that there might be meaning to its madness after all. Only time will tell.

Dancing Plague of 1518

From Wikimedia Commons by Pieter Brueghel the Elder.

If I would tell you that several centuries ago, people just started to dance one fine day to their deaths, and that nobody knows why, you would certainly say, “Bollocks!!”. Right?

Well that’s exactly what happened. According to stories, a woman by the name Mrs. Troffea just started dancing on the street in Strasbourg, in the month of July, 1518 and didn’t stop for four to six days. In just under a week, several others had joined her to dance non-stop.

Then within a month, 400 others joined and were largely females. A lot of these people died of heart attacks and exhaustion due to the non-stop dancing. Notes from the city council of Strasbourg confirm that these events actually took place.

The working theory suggested by experts is that of mass hysteria. But this has been challenged by others. To this day, no one is sure what caused all those people to dance to their deaths.

DB Cooper - The Unidentified Hijacker

From Wikimedia Commons.

In 1971, an unidentified man hijacked a Boeing 727 passenger plane claiming that he has a briefcase with a bomb in it. This was verified by one of the air stewardesses mid flight. He then went on to make his demands of $200,000 along with parachutes.

After the plane landed at the intended destination, he was given the money and the parachutes and then the passengers were released. Next he told the crew to set the plane on course to Mexico City only stopping for a refuel at Reno, Nevada.

On route to Mexico city, Cooper jumped off the plane from the rear airstairs and parachuted away into the night sky. Till today, no one knows of his whereabouts or whether he even survived the jump.

The FBI kept investigating the case until they finally decided to suspend active investigation in 2016.