Sailing Stones, Blood Falls and 6 More Mysteries That Stumped Scientists

History mysteries finally solved: rocks that seemed to slide across Death Valley by themselves, a glacier that bleeds, two ships lost in the Arctic ice and a king found under a car park. For generations nobody could explain them. Then, one by one, somebody did, and the oldest one is still not completely solved. Chapters: 0:00 Eight old mysteries 0:30 The rocks that move by themselves 2:31 The glacier that bleeds 4:06 The ships that vanished in the ice 6:15 The statues that walked 7:54 The king under the car park 9:51 The gravestones that said pestilence 11:28 The stone at the heart of Stonehenge 12:55 The fish that fooled Aristotle 14:49 What they all have in common Sources: Racetrack Playa: Norris, Norris, Lorenz, Ray and Jackson, "Sliding Rocks on Racetrack Playa, Death Valley National Park: First Observation of Rocks in Motion", PLOS ONE 9(8): e105948 (2014); U.S. National Park Service, Death Valley, "Racetrack Playa"; McAllister and Agnew, Geological Society of America Bulletin 59 (1948); Sharp and Carey, "Sliding stones, Racetrack Playa, California", GSA Bulletin 87 (1976) Blood Falls: Mikucki et al., "A Contemporary Microbially Maintained Subglacial Ferrous 'Ocean'", Science 324 (2009); Badgeley et al., Journal of Glaciology 63 (2017); Sklute et al., Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences 9:843174 (2022); Johns Hopkins University Hub on Blood Falls (2023); T. Griffith Taylor, "With Scott: The Silver Lining" (1916) Franklin expedition: Parks Canada, Wrecks of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror National Historic Site; the Victory Point note of 1847 and 1848, published in F. L. McClintock, "The Voyage of the 'Fox' in the Arctic Seas" (1859); Stenton et al., Polar Record 57 (2021) and Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 59 (2024); University of Waterloo news on four more identified sailors (May 2026); Keenleyside, Bertulli and Fricke, Arctic 50 (1997); Nunatsiaq News on Sammy Kogvik and HMS Terror (2016) Moai: Lipo, Hunt and Rapu Haoa, "The 'walking' megalithic statues (moai) of Easter Island", Journal of Archaeological Science 40 (2013); Lipo and Hunt, Journal of Archaeological Science 183:106383 (2025); Jacob Roggeveen's journal (1722); Katherine Routledge, "The Mystery of Easter Island" (1919); PBS NOVA, "Mystery of Easter Island" (2012); Jo Anne Van Tilburg, quoted in Nature (2012) Richard III: King et al., "Identification of the remains of King Richard III", Nature Communications 5:5631 (2014); Appleby et al., The Lancet 385 (2015); Buckley et al., Antiquity 87 (2013); University of Leicester, Richard III pages; Philippa Langley, interview with AFP (2013) Black Death: Spyrou et al., "The source of the Black Death in fourteenth-century central Eurasia", Nature 606 (2022); University of Tübingen and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, press release (June 2022) Stonehenge: Geoffrey of Monmouth, "History of the Kings of Britain" (c. 1136); H. H. Thomas, "The source of the stones of Stonehenge", The Antiquaries Journal 3 (1923); Clarke et al., "A Scottish provenance for the Altar Stone of Stonehenge", Nature 632 (2024); Clarke and Kirkland, Communications Earth & Environment 7:54 (2026); Clarke et al., Journal of Quaternary Science 41 (2026) Eels: Aristotle, History of Animals VI.16; Freud Museum London and Siegfried Bernfeld (1949) on Freud in Trieste; Linda Hall Library on Grassi and Calandruccio (1896); Johannes Schmidt, "The breeding places of the eel", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 211 (1923); Wright et al., "First direct evidence of adult European eels migrating to their breeding place in the Sargasso Sea", Scientific Reports 12:15362 (2022) Drawn badly, researched properly. Know a mystery that was finally solved? Tell me in the comments. Music: "Thinking Music" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under CC BY 4.0. Narration: AI voice. Drawings: original. #history #mystery #science