Year 2016 was a crazy block of time, there’s no denying that. From drug lords pulling off impossible escapes, to Jon Snow’s revival and the extraterrestrial ocean that contains some of the most unexplainable objects we’ve ever seen – it seems we have it all! And the more time goes by, the less chance we have in solving some of the Earth’s biggest mysteries. They have been piling up for ages! Year 2016 is no different and there are plenty of unexplained things going on and around Earth. Here are 10 mysteries that prove our planet is a crazy place.
‘WTF’ space junk
It doesn’t come as a surprise that all kinds of space junk is rotating all around us. In fact, many of these junk pieces pose an actual danger to astronauts and even the well-being of Earth itself! Scientists have spotted a huge piece of space junk in October and appropriately named it WT1190F (hence, the ‘WTF’ nickname). Everyone thought it would actually enter Earth’s atmosphere and plummet right into the Indian Ocean, but our mother planet is much stronger than that. The object burned to ashes once it entered Earth’s atmosphere in November, but the crazy thing is scientists still don’t know what it was! They think it might have been a piece of a rocket’s second stage, but they have no idea which rocket. It’s a mystery!
Where is Hayat Boumeddiene?
Hayat Boumeddiene was involved with the deadly terrorist attacks on Paris between the 7th and 9th of January. She was the wife of one of the three attackers that organized the whole thing. While the three of them were killed, Boumeddiene escaped and her whereabouts are still unclear. Investigators believe she traveled to Turkey and then went to Syria where she allegedly remains now. She’s one of the most wanted criminals on Earth!
The 8,000-year-old puzzle
Dmitriy Dey spotted these geoglyphs while he was searching for ancient pyramids on Google Earth. Scientists have no idea why they were built! The oldest of the objects was constructed 8,000 years ago and many believe they were used to track movements of the sun. NASA was so puzzled by this discovery that they are now working to unravel this mystery using the latest technologies.
El Chapo’s great escape
No one thought it was possible to break out of the Altiplano maximum security prison, but the Mexican drug cartel’s leader Guzman, also known as El Chapo, has made the impossible possible. He drilled a hole in a shower cell and escaped through a specially made underground tunnel on a bike! He ended up in a safe house long before the guards even noticed he was missing. This story is worthy of a TV show! His whereabouts remained a mystery for a long time, until he was re-captured during a raid by Mexican marines.
Ghost ships filled with corpses
More than a dozen boats filled with corpses sailed to the northwestern shores of Japan. All of them were filled with decomposing bodies, but showed no signs of foul play. Authorities couldn’t figure out the reason people on the wooden ships had died, nor were they able to find out where the ships came from. Some of them had remains of what seemed to be a North Korean flag, but investigators still can’t say for sure. The boats have been showing up since 2013 and they keep on coming!
Life on Saturn’s moon
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has reached Saturn and its 62 moons back in October. The brave piece of space tech even made a daring dive into an icy eruption on Enceladus, one of the planet’s moons that is an extraterrestrial ocean. It’s a pity that Cassini isn’t equipped with gadgets that can detect life forms. But Enceladus may still be chock-full of germs and become a habitable environment for our future explorations.
120,000 antelopes dead in just two weeks
More than a third of the global population of saiga antelopes died out in Kazakhstan in a span of just two weeks. It’s the largest and most tragic event of such kind ever reported! Scientists still don’t know what caused this, although a combination of biological and environmental issues might be involved. Many blame the rocket fuel and noise pollution caused by the many space launches from the facility. Russia is the principal client of the Baikonur Cosmodrome that’s located in Kazakhstan.
What happened to MH370?
Back in March 2014 MH370, a Boeing 777 aircraft, took off from Kuala Lumpur and vanished from the radars. The fact that a plane could disappear like that with all the modern technologies at play has baffled the whole world. A tiny piece of this puzzle has recently washed up to the shores of Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean. Investigators believe it’s a part of the plane’s flaperon. Nevertheless, the rest of the plane remains missing!
Siberian sinkholes
Something truly wicked was discovered at Siberia’s Yamal peninsula (a name that roughly translates as the ‘end of the world’). A 115-foot hole appeared out of nowhere after an unexplained explosion. A few more sinkholes appeared shortly after. Scientists think that gas explosions might be the reason these holes appeared, but they still don’t know for sure. They even sent a team down one of these holes to confirm their theories, but alas! They still can’t prove anything.
What’s hidden beneath the Stonehenge?
Good old Stonehenge still has a few aces up its sleeve. New underground mapping technologies revealed something really weird – it appears that there are shrines, pits and burial mounds hidden deep beneath the 5,000-year-old ruins of Stonehenge. Historians have always believed it was a standalone structure, but the new research changes everything! This new information might completely change what we know about the Stonehenge complex.
