In 1948, an unidentified, well-dressed man in his 40s was discovered dead on an Australian beach. A post-mortem found he’d been poisoned, presumed murdered. No-one claimed his body and the much-publicized case remained a mystery, until a few days ago, when, after a 13-year re-investigation, a DNA match proved him to be Carl ‘Charles’ Webb. The mysterious names and poetry extracts found with the deceased spawned theories he was a spy, but they may after all have a mundane explanation. Who murdered him and why remains unknown. As to mysteries surrounding the bodies of those who have never been found, we read that More People Disappear in the Alaska Triangle Than Anywhere (Including the Bermuda Triangle). Perhaps it’s unsurprising, given that it’s the largest state in the US by quite a margin, is mostly forest and mountains, and has a tiny population, so the chances of being found dead or alive in such a vast wilderness are pretty small. With some 16,000 disappearances unsolved since 1988, there is of course speculation that ‘something else is going on’ which can’t be accounted for by the lonely terrain, even though the latter is the most likely explanation. But, as Mike Richard points out, we prefer mysteries because “those are way more interesting.” (LP)
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