12. The Valentich Disappearance

We like to believe that we live in a world of certainties. Up is up, down is down, dogs and cats hate each other, you eat hamburgers instead of the other way around. If somebody gets killed, there is a reason found, through autopsy and police investigation. If somebody disappears, they're eventually found. Mysterious graffiti is usually nothing more than viral marketing for a new movie coming out. UFOs are just weather balloons or Christmas tree lights tied around a swan. Everything can be explained, and everything has an answer. That is a total lie. Sorry, but it's true. Don't shoot the messenger. Somebody had to tell you, and just be glad it's us, because at least we'll pepper some jokes in amongst all this life-shattering news. We've already blown your - and our - minds with scientific concepts that nobody can get their heads around , but that stuff's all theoretical, and academic. What about the real unsolved mysteries, the stuff that you can identify with, with aliens and dead people and stuff? Brother, have we got some crazy unsolved mysteries for you. Some stretching back fifty years or more, from crimes that were never explained to people seemingly dropping off of the face of the Earth to never be seen again, there are more unexplained things in this life than you think. And not all of them involve prime numbers. Some of them involve an international conspiracy to begin life anew on Jupiter. Or something. We don't know; it's unexplained. Here are twelve of the craziest modern day, real life mysteries that have never been solved.So look, we're just gonna go ahead and set our stall out from the start here. All of the mysteries here on out are completely unsolved, true, but that doesn't stop people from trying, and often going the opposite-of-Occam's-Razor route by suggesting the most ridiculous explanations for them. The Valentich disappearance is no different; people reckon that UFOs do it. We have to say up front, that UFOs probably didn't do it, but that doesn't make the whole thing any less strange. In fact, 20-year-old Frederick Valentich himself would've been happy with the alien abduction theory. A self-confessed "flying saucer enthusiast", this young Aussie was on a solo training flight in a light aircraft when he radioed air traffic control to report another aircraft flying about 1,000 feet above him, complaining that his engine was running rough, before finally stating "It's not a aircraft". And that was the last anybody heard from Frederick Valentich. After a week of searching, encompassing 1,000 square miles, investigators found nothing. No trace of Frederick, his plane, or the not-aircraft that had joined him out of nowhere. Five years later, an engine cowl flap washed up on a beach, and might have been part of his light aircraft. That's all we know for sure. Some people think that Valentich had orchestrated his own disappearance, and simply incorporated his obsession with flying saucers into it. Others thought it suicide. One theory has it that the young, inexperienced pilot had become disoriented, flipped his plane without realising and the orbiting lights he saw "above" him were actually reflections on the water he then plunged into. Or, y'know, it might have been UFOs. But probably not.