We’re still above the waterline! Let’s see what mysteries we can find up here before diving below the surface.

DB Cooper

This is the case of a certified madlad who hijacked a plane in 1971 and then jumped out the aft stairwell mid-flight with a parachute and a bag containing his ransom money. Years later some of the money was found in the wilderness beneath the plane’s flight path, but no sign of Cooper or his remains have ever been located, leading to longstanding speculation as to his identity and whether he survived his fateful jump. If you want to learn more, I recommend this delightful Youtube documentary.

Multiple potential suspects have been identified, but I personally don’t find any of them particularly convincing, as the evidence in all cases is very circumstantial. All of the suspects also rely on the assumption that Cooper did in fact survive his night-time plunge, an assumption I don’t think I’m willing to make given that he jumped into remote wilderness in bad weather. I think the odds are fairly good that Cooper died on impact with the ground or shortly thereafter, his remains resting somewhere that was never found.

One rebuttal to this assertion is that no one matching Cooper’s description has ever been reported missing. My rebuttal to that rebuttal is that cases like Lyle Stevik or Mostly Harmless illustrate that it’s remarkably easy for people to go missing without raising any suspicion, even in modern times, to say nothing of the early 1970s. Cooper could have either lost all of his familial and platonic connections or just walked away from them, resulting in his lonely death going unnoticed.

Will we ever get a resolution to this mystery? Unless a credible posthumous confession is uncovered, I doubt it. But that’s what makes it such a fun story.

Southern Television Broadcast Interruption

I love broadcast intrusions. TV, radio, I don’t care what the format is. People hijacking publicly-available media for the purposes of trolling is always a good time.

This is a lesser-known case that happened in England in 1977. During a news segment, someone took over the ITV channel for six minutes in order to broadcast a bunch of hippy shit supposedly conveyed by an alien named Vrillon, representative of the “Ashtar Galactic Command.” Vrillion beseeched humanity to give up nuclear weapons, renounce war and generally embrace peace and love in order to benefit from the coming Age Of Aquarius. If you’re familiar at all with New Age and UFO mythology of the period, this will all sound very familiar. It was a more innocent time.

The people involved have never been caught, and probably won’t be given how long ago it happened. Due to the progress of digital broadcast technology this sort of pranking is, to my understanding, not really possible any more, which kind of makes me wish the few people who pulled it off back in the day generated more interesting content than random nonsense or treacly New Age bullshit.

Shauna Maynard

AKA one of multiple cases where someone on 4Chan might have confessed to murder for internet clout

Shauna Maynard was murdered at the age of seventeen in 1998. Her killer was never found and the case went cold. Cut to 2015, where a user on 4Chan’s /b/ (or “random”) board claimed to have killed several women and offered to upload photos of them if anyone guessed their names. If the users on /b/ guessed all the names correctly, he’d give them the location of an undiscovered body.

Assuming this was a joke, 4Chan denizens started listing off female names…and very quickly guessed right, at which point the anonymous user dutifully uploaded the promised photos, supposedly depicting his victims post-mortem.

The original thread–which I don’t recommend you seek out since the photos are very graphic–is actually kind of funny if you can get over the incredibly morbid subject material, as about half the users assumed the pictures were crime-scene photos that someone was posting as a prank and the other half started frantically calling the FBI (and then they all started arguing and calling each other slurs, because this was 4Chan). Eventually this collective of brain geniuses identified the woman in the photos as Shauna Maynard based on a high school yearbook picture that the supposed killer had included.

The FBI apparently ended up concluding that the post was likely a hoax due to a lack of similarities between the photos and the known circumstances of Shauna Maynard’s death. However, that leaves the question: Where did the gruesome photos come from? If the woman in the photo wasn’t Shauna, who was she? And who were the other people in the pictures?

The Zodiac Killer

You probably already know the basic gist of who this guy is thanks to the (very inaccurate) David Fincher movie, but here’s the short version: in the 1960s an unknown serial killer murdered several people in and around San Francisco, sending coded messages to newspaper outlets that supposedly contained his identity (the two most substantial letters have been decoded and have yeilded no useful information). As of this writing, the case is still officially open in two counties in northern California.

The Zodiac Killer is an interesting case, because his crimes by themselves weren’t particularly sensational or gruesome–he had relatively few victims, and he killed them at the scene with a handgun or a knife, rather than abducting and torturing them like most famous serial killers. Rather, the Zodiac case rose to prominence due to the theatrical nature of the killer himself. In addition to the coded letters, he wore a bizarre face-concealing costume during at least one of the slayings, like a Batman villain.

The killer is almost certainly dead at this point, but the hunt for his identity goes on. Recently internet sleuths and professional investigators alike had their hopes pinned on familial DNA analysis, the new method bringing rapid closure to scores of unsolved cases (including the identity of the Golden State Killer, long thought to have joined the Zodiac in the pantheon of unsolvability), but that appears not to have panned out.

With the ciphers yielding no clues and the DNA angle seemingly a dead end, will the Zodiac Killer ever be identified? New suspects continue to come to light–there was one publicized just last year–and the case continues to receive a lot of attention, both amateur and professional alike.

Personally, I’m cautiously optimistic that we will, some day, get a definitive identification. The fact that the police went silent on the DNA evidence instead of confirming that it was a dud makes me suspect that they might actually have found something and are now keeping it close to their chests for legal reasons (it wouldn’t be the first time this has happened). Even if that’s not the case, the field of familial DNA analysis is advancing rapidly–maybe a new test will come along that can finally close this case for good.

Mantis Man

Mantis man! Yeah! Let’s go bitches, it’s Mantis Man!

Sorry.

Mantis Man is a giant seven-foot tall mantis that’s been spotted in New Jersey near a particular river. I love everything about Mantis Man: the fact that it’s called Mantis Man, the fact that it’s a giant mantis, the fact that it lives in New Jersey. Everything about it is objectively great.

So Mantis Man is definitely real. I’m a Mantis Man truther now and will not tolerate any argument to the contrary. If you don’t also believe in Mantis Man, you’re dead to me.

Selene Delgado

This is one of those pieces of modern internet mythology that I find fascinating. It’s got it all: Creepy childhood memories, missing people, spooky faces.

If you want the full version you should check out this video, but the short version is that a TV segment on Mexican TV in the 90s repeatedly featured a young woman named Selene Delgado who–as far as anyone can work out–doesn’t seem to have existed. No missing woman with her name and description can be found in the relevant time period, leading to speculation that Selene was invented by the TV channel for some reason.

There’s also this whole aspect of the mystery where people think that Selene’s photo (there’s only one) looks creepy and could be fake, which I frankly don’t agree with. The white background and facial expression are a little odd for what’s supposed to be a candid photo, but not to the extent that it makes me think the picture was fabricated.

Still, that leaves the bigger question: Who was Selene Delgado? Why can’t anyone find any evidence that she existed outside of this one TV segment? And if she was a missing person, what happened to her?

There is a somewhat distasteful aspect of this whole thing, in that Selene Delgado turned into something of a horror meme after getting associated with a creepy mock-up of murderer Derrick Todd Lee and a Facebook urban legend that’s too convoluted to go into. Think that’s kind of a shame, considering this might very well be a young woman whose life was tragically cut short at the age of only eighteen.