Great Mysteries of Our Time

INGRID THOFT

We’re all mystery lovers:  We wouldn’t be here if we weren’t!  Most of the mystery readers I meet also enjoy the puzzle of real life mysteries.  It’s not unusual to find kindred spirits at mystery conferences who also love Forty-Eight Hours and Dateline.  

Some mysteries will remain mysteries during my lifetime, and that's okay. But there are some questions to which I would love to get the answers. Here are some of them:

Amelia Earhart

What really happened to Amelia Earhart? Did she crash on an island and live for many years among the native population? Did her plane crash into the Pacific, the mystery of her disappearance far outlasting the length of her natural life? And did you know that she was married to George “G.P.” Putnam of the publishing house? The very house that publishes my books? Amelia was thirty-nine at the time of her disappearance. Can you imagine the things she would have accomplished had she lived?

D.B. Cooper
Living in the pacific northwest, I’ve found that D.B. Cooper has particularly captured the imaginations of local mystery fans.  On November 24, 1971, a man boarded a plane in Portland, OR, and during the flight to Seattle, WA, made a ransom demand.  The flight landed, refueled and took on board the requested $200,000 and four parachutes.  All the passengers with the exception of four members of the flight crew were released.  The flight took off again, and somewhere over the Washington/Oregon border, the hijacker jumped out of the plane with the money.

Fragments of the money were found in 1980, but otherwise, no remains or evidence have been discovered.  D.B. Cooper wasn’t actually the name of the hijacker who purchased his ticket using the alias “Dan Cooper.”  A man named Dan Cooper was cleared early on in the investigation, but a reporter misheard his name and from then on, the hijacker was known as D.B. Cooper.  Did he survive the jump out of the plane?  If so, where did he go?  If not, where’s the rest of the money?

Kryptos

This is a mystery that’s new to me and one that was made by design, literally.  Outside of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, there stands a sculpture by American artist Jim Sanborn.  There are four encrypted messages on the sculpture, three of which have been solved.  The fourth remains a mystery and a source of much speculation in the worldwide community of cryptographers. Kryptos is featured in Dan Brown’s novel “The Lost Symbol.”  This is a mystery that will perhaps be solved; Sanborn has given two clues to the "New York Times" to help puzzle fanatics solve the fourth message.

So what really happened to Jonbenét Ramsey, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ron Goldman?  Is Jimmy Hoffa really buried under the west end zone in Giants' stadium?  Will Malaysia Airlines flight #370 ever be found?  

What about you? Which mysteries would you love to see solved in your lifetime?