Who was Jack the Ripper, where did the Moth Man disappear and did Richard III really kill the princes in the Tower? History is full of mysteries, and a person is not able to solve the simplest of them - simply because some things are better left in the shadows. Dr. David Clarke, author of the British Historical Society, spent several years reading documents from the National Archives. In his opinion, these five biggest puzzles in history will remain a mystery to all of us.
Princes in the Tower
Edward, 12, and his nine-year-old brother, Richard Shrewsbury, sons of King Edward IV, were imprisoned in the Tower by order of Richard III. The English Parliament passed a law according to which both formal heirs to the throne were declared illegitimate. In the summer of the same year (1483), both princes mysteriously disappeared from the impregnable fortress. The prisoners of the Tower seemed to have disappeared into thin air - historians have already despaired of finding an answer to this riddle.
Devil footprints in Devon
Early in the morning of February 9, 1855, Devon's people took to the snowy streets and immediately rushed to the church. A chain of strange footprints stretched across the snow, as if left by the devil's hoof. This led to mass hysteria, which quickly spread throughout the district. Scientists put forward a lot of assumptions, but none of them could explain how the clear traces of one horseshoe stretched for hundreds of kilometers. Even more interesting is the testimony of the famous British navigator: during the Antarctic expedition, James Clark Ross wrote that he had met similar tracks on Kerguelen Island.
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Jack the Ripper
The true identity of this Victorian serial killer remains an enigma 126 years after the horrific events in London's East End. The most likely modern historians consider the version according to which the killer was the Polish emigrant Aaron Kosminski - it was his DNA that was found on one of the victims. Critics quite reasonably refute this version - the murdered, like all the other victims of the Ripper, was a prostitute and Aaron could well be just her client.
Solway astronaut
On the afternoon of May 23, 1964, Cumbrian Fire Service Officer Jim Templeton photographed his wife and daughter in Solway Firth Park. The next day, Templeton went to develop the pictures at the Kodak salon, where, together with an employee, he was horrified by a strange figure in a space suit that appeared out of nowhere in the picture. The photograph was carefully studied by Kodak chemists and recognized as real. The police also paid no less attention to the photo - they did not find an explanation either. Jim Templeton died in 2011 without knowing the truth about his Space Satellite. The image remains one of the most mysterious in the history of anomalous photography.
Moth man
The mass hysteria of 1966 began with the story of four American teenagers who unanimously claim that they saw a huge flying monster with red eyes at Point Pleasant in rural West Virginia. The next morning, the sheriff's office held a press conference after which the media called the creation "Mothman," the Moth Man. It is completely incomprehensible why a story told by impressionable adolescents was able to convince adults so. Moreover, famed journalist John Keele conducted an investigation, as a result of which he wrote an entire book about the unexplained outbreak of supernatural accidents in the Ohio Valley. King believed that the creature was somehow mysteriously connected to the collapse of the Silver Bridge at Point Pleasant in December 1967, which killed 46 people.