By Andy Guerriero
We like to feel superior to the people who lived centuries ago, what with their shitty mud huts and curing colds by drilling a hole in their skulls. But we have to give them credit: They left behind some artifacts that have left the smartest of modern scientists scratching their heads.
For instance, you have the following enigmas that we believe were created for no other purpose than to fuck with future generations.
#6.
The Mystery:
The Voynich manuscript is an ancient book that has thwarted all attempts at deciphering its contents. And it's not like some idiot just scribbled a bunch of nonsense on paper and went, "Figure THIS out, fuckwads." It is actually an organized book with a consistent script, discernible organization and detailed illustrations.
It appears to be a real language--just one that nobody has seen before. And it really does appear to mean something. But nobody knows what.
Translation: "...and when you get her to put the tennis racket in her mouth, have her stand in a fountain for a while. Then draw pictures of her."
There is not even a consensus on who wrote it, or even when it was written. And we sure as fuck don't know why.
Why Can't They Solve It?
Could you? Look at this shit:
Don't even try. Expert military code-breakers, cryptographers, mathematicians, linguists, people who get paid to find and decipher patterns, have all been left unable to decipher a single word.
As you can imagine, proposed solutions have been all over the board, from reasonable to completely clownshit. Some say it's an unbreakable code that requires a key to solve. Some say it's a hoax, and a damned fine one if we do say ourselves. Some say it's glossolalia, which is the fine art of speaking or writing something you don't understand but that is being channeled to you by God or aliens or whatever (note that the word was chosen specifically to make you sound retarded when saying it).
Our Guess:
It's written in English, by a person who was extremely shitty at writing in English.
#5.
The Mystery:
The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient, intricate machine found in a shipwreck near Greece that dates back to about 100 BC. The Antikythera mechanism contains gears and structures that were not found in devices again for 1000 years, and only then when the Muslims and Chinese were busy inventing shit while the Europeans were busy killing each other.
Why Can't They Solve It?
First, no one can agree on where the Antikythera mechanism was made or who designed it. Popular belief was that it was made by the Greeks due to its instructions all being in Greek (about a million of our tax dollars were probably spent arriving at that genius conclusion) but serious research published in serious places suggested the design came from Sicily.
And a billion parts with indecipherable instructions suggest it comes from Ikea. Ba-zing!
The mechanism, aside from placing you at serious risk for severing a finger, was supposedly used to figure out astronomical positions. The problem with that is that at the time this thing was made, no one had yet discovered laws of gravity or how heavenly bodies moved.
In other words, the Antikythera mechanism appears to have functions that no one alive at that time would have understood, and no single mechanical purpose of that era (such as navigating ships) explains the crazy number of functions and settings this machine has.
Our Guess:
It's a scrap from a time machine that exploded the moment it arrived in the past.
#4.
The Mystery:
In an area of China not known to ever contain people, let alone industry, there are three mysterious triangular openings on top of a mountain containing hundreds of ancient rusty iron pipes of unknown origin. Some of the pipes go deep into the mountain. Some of them go into a nearby salt water lake. There are more pipes in the lake, and more still running east-west along the lake shore. Some of the larger pipes are 40 cm in diameter, are of uniform size and are placed in what seems like purposeful patterns.
Hey, vagina caves.
So what's the big deal? Well, archaeologists have dated the pipes to a time when people were still trying to figure out how to cook meat without setting their back-hair on fire, let alone casting iron.
Why Can't They Solve It?
Oddly, the pipes are clean of debris despite being older than Zeus. This suggests that they were not simply shoved into the ground for the hell of it, but actually used for something. Oh, and did we mention the mountain is completely inhospitable to human life?
As usual, a faction of nutjobs believes the Baigong Pipes to be an ancient astronomy lab or even spacecraft launching site left by extraterrestrials. This is possible, since the pipes contain a proportion of silica close to what occurs on Mars. Of course, the manhole cover outside your house does also, so take that with a grain of salt.
Some say they are a hoax. We must politely remind those people that you can't wipe your ass in China without the government knowing, let alone set up a fucking iron forge and start burying pipes in the ground for the purpose of confusing passers-by.
Our Guess:
Long ago, a group of frustrated fishermen with lots and lots of spare time spent their whole lives building a plumbing system to drain that nearby lake. Then they figured they'd just walk right down there with wheelbarrows, scoop up the fish and eat like kings.
#3.
The Mystery:
Costa Rica and a few surrounding areas are scattered with giant stone balls. They are smooth and perfectly spherical, or nearly so. Some of them are quite small, a few inches in diameter, but some of them are as large as eight feet in diameter weighing several tons.
They have been chiseled to perfection by persons unknown, despite the fact that Costa Rica is still not scheduled to enter the Bronze Age until 2013. The are balls everywhere and serve no apparent purpose, like a swing club on Gentlemen's Night.
And God said, "It's nice, but could use some more purposeless balls."
Some of the balls have been blasted apart by locals hoping to find gold, coffee beans, or even babies. Some have been rolled around, but some are too heavy to move even with a bulldozer. Not that they have bulldozers in Costa Rica.
Why Can't They Solve It?
About the most useful information anyone has gotten is that there are not, under any circumstance, any quarries anywhere near the balls. This information is actually useless considering the balls are carved from volcanic rock.
Our Guess:
In 1,000 years the eggs of the stone men will hatch, and their offspring will emerge to rule the Earth.
#2.
The Mystery:
The Baghdad Batteries are a series of artifacts found in the area of Mesopotamia dating from the early centuries AD. This was the approximate time when Gozer the Gozarian was roaming the lands, morphing into whatever you thought of and then devouring you [source].
When archaeologists stumbled upon the batteries, they assumed they were just regular old clay pots for storage, but that theory quickly went out the window since they each contain a copper rod that shows evidence of acid corrosion. Now, in case you weren't the biggest nerd in school, this means that the pots probably contained a liquid that would interact with the copper and produce an electrical charge. If true, they predate the first known modern battery by hundreds of years.
And that's all well and good, but what the fuck were they using batteries for?
Why Can't They Solve It?
Well, it's not like we keep digging up ancient camcorders over there. Some stone reliefs called the "Dendera light" depict what some believe to be electrical arc lights, which would require something like the Baghdad Batteries to power. Others believe that theory is incredibly retarded.
More reasonable types say the batteries may have been used to electroplate items with gold. Others say medicine men could have used the batteries to shock people (giving the impression they had mystical powers or whatever).
It doesn't help that the batteries are currently located in the Baghdad Museum, which means potential researchers have a sporting chance of being blown to shit on any given day.
Our Guess:
Take them to Egypt. Somewhere inside the Sphinx, they'll find several holes. Plug these batteries in there and the Sphinx's eyes will light up. Then it will start scooting around the desert floor making a mechanical barking sound.
And then someone forms the head.
#1.
The Mystery:
Tired of having its mind blown by the guys in the archeology department, in 1997 modern science's mind pulled itself up off the mat and triumphantly blew itself.
In that year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recorded a strange sound in the ocean. Strange and LOUD. So loud that it was picked up by two separate microphones 3,000 fucking miles apart. The sound, dubbed "The Bloop," doesn't sound like anything at normal speed. However, the NOAA did us the favor of speeding up the recording to 16 times the normal speed, causing it to sound like a turd dropping into the toilet. Bloop! Except, you know, awesomely loud.
Scientists determined that its wave pattern indicates it was made by an animal, and not a giant electromagnet sucking a plane out of the sky, as the creators of Lost were no doubt hoping.
Why Can't They Solve It?
There is no animal big enough or loud enough to make that kind of noise, not by a long shot. Not a blue whale, not a howler monkey, not a startled teenage girl.
Not long after the NOAA posted the sound to their web site, some HP Lovecraft fans on the internet quite reasonably decided that The Bloop must have been made by Lovecraft's Cthulhu, a giant, murderous squid-dragon-thing.
Our Guess:
Yeah, we're also going with Cthulhu.
For mysteries that only sound mind blowing, check out 6 Famous Unsolved Mysteries With Really Obvious Solutions. Or for examples of people who landed on the wrong end of an unsolved mystery, check out 6 People Who Just Fucking Disappeared. And be sure to visit Cracked.com's Top Picks to see what we're looking at instead of working.
Source: http://www.cracked.com
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