Add a link to an article or other coverage of the mystery if you can.


Here’s one: The Max Headroom signal hijacking incident

In 1987, two individuals hijacked television signals of two TV stations at night and broadcasted creepy footage of someone wearing a Max Headloom mask and costume to viewers. They were never identified.

See:
Video 1
Video 2

    • According to investigators she injected herself with a massive dose of a fast acting drug then threw the injector away, did something with her shoes (no explanation as to what, she was barefoot and her feet were clean so must have been wearing some if she walked there herself and her shoes were not found at the scene), and then tied herself up in a painful and awkward position in the seconds it would take for the drug to affect her movements and render her unconscious.

      Those investigators were working hard to deny that she had been being stalked for years while they had blamed and accused her. They didn’t even notice when they passed the point of incredulity.

  • zhaosima@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I am intrigued about this whole UAP whistleblower guy named David Grusch.
    Is it Psyops, confused officials, a business model (to sell books, speak on conferences)?

  • tal@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Probably not quite what you were expecting, but:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

    The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence. As a 2015 article put it, “If life is so easy, someone from somewhere must have come calling by now.”

    The argument can be summarized like this: it seems likely that intelligent life has evolved elsewhere in the universe – the universe is a big place. It took a very long time for this evolution to occur in the only case we know of – it took us billions of years. One can reasonably assume that some supposed alien intelligent life out there will evolve more quickly, others less. Statistically, we should assume that we are most-likely about in the middle in terms of our rate of evolution – it would be unexpected for us to be the very fastest-evolving intelligent life in the universe. It takes time to travel between the stars, but as best we can tell, not very long compared to the kind of time required to evolve – once a civilization is able to do travel in space, we would expect it to spread, and do so quickly compared to the time required to evolve. So if one guesses that maybe half of alien intelligent life evolved more quickly than we did, a lot of it should have had a lot of time to spread throughout the universe by now.

    But we have seen nothing that appears to be alien intelligent life on Earth or elsewhere. How can this be?

    There are some proposed answers to the paradox that are a bit disturbing.

    It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself

    This is the argument that technological civilizations may usually or invariably destroy themselves before or shortly after developing radio or spaceflight technology. The astrophysicist Sebastian von Hoerner stated that the progress of science and technology on Earth was driven by two factors—the struggle for domination and the desire for an easy life. The former potentially leads to complete destruction, while the latter may lead to biological or mental degeneration. Possible means of annihilation via major global issues, where global interconnectedness actually makes humanity more vulnerable than resilient, are many, including war, accidental environmental contamination or damage, the development of biotechnology, synthetic life like mirror life, resource depletion, climate change, or poorly-designed artificial intelligence. This general theme is explored both in fiction and in scientific hypothesizing.

    We are right about at that point in technological development ourselves. We cannot yet travel to the stars, but we can travel in space, and reaching the stars does not seem to present fundamentally unsolvable challenges. If that answer is the correct one, then we would expect such a destructive event to occur to humanity before long.

    It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy others

    Another hypothesis is that an intelligent species beyond a certain point of technological capability will destroy other intelligent species as they appear, perhaps by using self-replicating probes. Science fiction writer Fred Saberhagen has explored this idea in his Berserker series, as has physicist Gregory Benford and, as well, science fiction writer Greg Bear in his The Forge of God novel, and later Liu Cixin in his The Three-Body Problem series.

    A species might undertake such extermination out of expansionist motives, greed, paranoia, or aggression. In 1981, cosmologist Edward Harrison argued that such behavior would be an act of prudence: an intelligent species that has overcome its own self-destructive tendencies might view any other species bent on galactic expansion as a threat. It has also been suggested that a successful alien species would be a superpredator, as are humans.

    • kuontom@kbin.socialOP
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      1 year ago

      I think reading up on this has made me more appreciate the profoundness of that Arthur C. Clarke quote

      Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying

      The possibility of being alone is not just terrifying in and of itself. Its horror is also in mulling over why we might be alone.

  • Duchess@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    the asha degree case is one that occupies my mind a lot. not necessarily super disturbing but if we have all the information then asha had very little reason to pick up and leave.

    • Suedeltica@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Oh yeah, that one haunts me. Such an unusual, eerie case. I hope her family gets real answers someday. What a nightmare.

    • kuontom@kbin.socialOP
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      1 year ago

      The second case is infuriating.

      Mendonça was 11 years old

      A prostitute, Alcina Dias, confirmed that [Afonso Dias] had taken Mendonça to see her on the day he disappeared. [Afonso Dias] allegedly drove up to see her in his car and asked her if she was working. When she assented, he offered to pay her to have sex with Mendonça.

      and later

      police forces raided alleged members of an international child pornography ring known as the Wonderland Club. The operation was code-named Operation Cathedral and resulted in the confiscation of 750,000 images and videos depicting 1,263 different children. Mendonça was among the few children (16 only) that could be identified. However, his whereabouts remain unknown and police suspect that he was murdered by his abductors after being abused on camera for other members of the paedophile ring.

      Top it off with the fact that the police refused to take his disappearance seriously initially and just assumed he was lost or injured and would eventually turn up.

      Fucked up.

      • Kurama@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        It really is. Police never confirmed that it was in fact Rui Pedro’s photos, but it’s the most believed theory here. That he was caught in child trafficking and murdered.