The Baigong Pipes

Not scary, just unsolved.



In an area of China not known to ever contain people, let alone industry, there are three mysterious triangular openings on top of a mountain containing hundreds of ancient rusty iron pipes of unknown origin. Some of the pipes go deep into the mountain. Some of them go into a nearby salt water lake. There are more pipes in the lake, and more still running east-west along the lake shore. Some of the larger pipes are 40 cm in diameter, are of uniform size and are placed in what seems like purposeful patterns.

So what's the big deal? Well, archaeologists have dated the pipes to a time when people were still trying to figure out how to cook meat without setting their back-hair on fire, let alone casting iron.



Why Can't They Solve It?
Oddly, the pipes are clean of debris despite being older than Zeus. This suggests that they were not simply shoved into the ground for the hell of it, but actually used for something. Oh, and did we mention the mountain is completely inhospitable to human life?
As usual, a faction of nutjobs believes the Baigong Pipes to be an ancient astronomy lab or even spacecraft launching site left by extraterrestrials. This is possible, since the pipes contain a proportion of silica close to what occurs on Mars. Of course, the manhole cover outside your house does also, so take that with a grain of salt.

Some say they are a hoax. We must politely remind those people that you can't wipe your ass in China without the government knowing, let alone set up a f***ing iron forge and start burying pipes in the ground for the purpose of confusing passers-by.

Our Guess:
Long ago, a group of frustrated fishermen with lots and lots of spare time spent their whole lives building a plumbing system to drain that nearby lake. Then they figured they'd just walk right down there with wheelbarrows, scoop up the fish and eat like kings.

The Giant Stone Balls of Costa Rica

The article from cracked.com are written like this. Not me. I just copy and paste.



The Mystery:

Costa Rica and a few surrounding areas are scattered with giant stone balls. They are smooth and perfectly spherical, or nearly so. Some of them are quite small, a few inches in diameter, but some of them are as large as eight feet in diameter weighing several tons.

They have been chiseled to perfection by persons unknown, despite the fact that Costa Rica is still not scheduled to enter the Bronze Age until 2013. The are balls everywhere and serve no apparent purpose, like a swing club on Gentlemen's Night.


Some of the balls have been blasted apart by locals hoping to find gold, coffee beans, or even babies. Some have been rolled around, but some are too heavy to move even with a bulldozer. Not that they have bulldozers in Costa Rica.

Why Can't They Solve It?
About the most useful information anyone has gotten is that there are not, under any circumstance, any quarries anywhere near the balls. This information is actually useless considering the balls are carved from volcanic rock.

Our Guess:

In 1,000 years the eggs of the stone men will hatch, and their offspring will emerge to rule the Earth.

Also from cracked. So funny for me laa~

The Not So Mysterious Bermuda Triangle



Well for one thing, that's not even a triangle.

This is the granddaddy of supposed paranormal phenomena. You know the story: you go into the Triangle, you don't come out. It's some kind of magical black hole around Florida, Puerto Rico and Bermuda where ships, planes and probably countless confused whales have disappeared. According to paranormal "experts" this is easily attributable to either aliens, interdimensional portals, demons, ghosts, Bigfoot, ghost Bigfoot, sea monsters or stargates.



Even Christopher Columbus claimed he saw weird shit there more than 500 years ago. To read books about the subject, you'd think ships disappear by the hundreds every week.

So what's the deal? Are the boats getting sucked through a time portal? Being sunk by savages from the mystical lost city of Atlantis? Or is it Cthulhu? It's Cthulhu, isn't it?



The Obvious Answer:
Again we must refer to the scientific phenomenon called People Making Up Bullshit. As experts have pointed out, the entire Bermuda Triangle mystery is based around people taking routine disappearances and spicing them up in the retelling. So for instance, part of the legend is a plane inexplicably vanished off the coast of Daytona on a sunny day in 1957. A search of the newspaper that day revealed that either it didn't happen, or all the witnesses signed a pact of silence in their own blood lest the triangle take them too.

They like to describe missing ships as having "disappeared" or saying they "were never seen again", which immediately brings to mind magic. In reality when a boat sinks you're probably not going to see it again because, you know, it's on the bottom of the f***ing ocean.

Believers often fail to mention that many of the disappearances happen during storms and rough seas, when you'd pretty much expect ships to sink. Other times ships would be reported missing and thus added to the Triangle's tally, then nobody bothers to correct it when the ships turn up later unharmed (like because the Captain was drunk off his ass and accidentally sailed to Portugal).

But the final stake into the heart of the Dracula that is the Bermuda Triangle mystery is the fact that the number of disappearances is no larger than any other well-traveled part of the ocean (the Triangle includes some of the busiest waters on the planet).



Once again, the only magic at work is the mystical human hunger for bullshit.

Crystal skull already solved. The link inside leads to official archaeology.org website.

The Mystery:

Here's something that might have gotten obscured by the cloud of complaints that swirled around the last Indiana Jones film: the crystal skull mentioned in the title is actually based on a real thing. Said skull has gotten a very spooky reputation as one of the world's more mysterious artifacts.

It was found in Belize in 1924 by Anna Mitchell-Hedges, daughter of explorer F.A. Mitchell-Hedges, on a collapsed altar in an ancient Mayan temple. Anna and her father later discovered that the skull was 3,600 years old, and was concisely called "The Skull of Doom." It was used by Mayan priests to wish death upon their enemies. Mitchell-Hedges came to believe that the skull had been polished by hand from a single chunk of crystal using nothing but sand over a period of 300 years. She even claimed that the skull has mysterious powers.

Modern-day skull followers say that the skull is related to the Mayan 2012 doomsday prophecy, and that bringing the 13 crystal skulls from all around the world together before 12/21/12 is the only way for humanity to survive. Yes, there are more -- six have been found. One is in the British Museum in London, three are in the Quai Branley Museum in Paris, one is in the Smithsonian and the Mitchell-Hedges skull is the last, and said to be the most powerful. We have just over a year to find the other seven. Oh man, we're doomed.

The Solution:
But there are so many unanswered questions! Why did Mitchell-Hedges and his daughter never mention the skull until 30 years after the expedition? Why did nobody else who went with them ever say anything? Oh wait, turns out he just bought it at a Sotheby's auction in 1943.

But hey, just because F.A. Mitchell-Hedges was full of shit about where it came from doesn't necessarily rule it out as a fake, right? It could still be thousands of years old and made by ancient Mayans or aliens or whatever.

Sure, except in 2008 Anna Mitchell-Hedges' widower, Bill Homann, brought the skull to Jane Walsh, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian. Using a scanning electron microscope, she found that the skull hadn't been polished with sand, but with a high-speed diamond-tipped rotary tool, which, if you're keeping score at home, would not be a thing ancient Mayans would have. In fact, Walsh thinks that the skull was probably carved sometime in the 1930s. As far as the five other skulls? Yeah, they're all modern fakes, too. Except for Indiana Jones movie. Indiana don't lie.

Nope, one is an island in San Francisco, one is on land in Philadelphia.