Top 10 Most Mysterious People Ever – These strange, mysterious and unexplained individuals have puzzled investigators for years. No one knows their true identity. See 10 of the strangest people in history.
10. Satoshi Nakamoto
While we may not know who he (or she) was, we know what he did. He was the inventor of the bitcoin protocol, publishing a paper via the Cryptography Mailing List in November 2008.
He then released the first version of the bitcoin software client in 2009, and participated with others on the project via mailing lists, until he finally began to fade from the community toward the end of 2010.
He worked with people on the open-source team, but took care never to reveal anything personal about himself, and the last anyone heard from him was in the spring of 2011, when he said that he had “moved on to other things”.
9. Poe Toaster
The Poe Toaster is the nickname given to a mysterious man who pays annual tribute to Poe by visiting his grave every year. The strange tradition started in 1949 – a century are after Poe’s death, and it occurs every year on the author’s birthday (January 19). According to Wikipedia: “In the early hours of the morning on that date, a black-clad figure, presumed to be male, with a silver-tipped cane enters the Westminster Hall and Burying Ground in Baltimore, Maryland. The individual proceeds to Poe’s grave, where he or she raises a cognac toast. Before departing, the Toaster leaves three red roses and a half-bottle of cognac on the grave.”
The Toaster wears a black hat and coat and hides his face with a hood or scarf. Groups of reporters and admirers are often on hand to watch the event. There have been no attempts to interfere with the Toaster or to unmask him – most likely out of respect for the tradition.
8. Umbrella Man
At the moment when bullets were being fired into JFK’s motorcade, a man can be seen standing on the side of the road near the car holding an open black umbrella. But it wasn’t raining. This is exactly the kind of detail that sets a fire under conspiracy theorists — and here’s why.
Indeed, it was a sunny day, although it had rained the night before, and no one else in Dallas was holding an umbrella. It is a genuine anomaly – something that sticks out like a sore thumb.
7. The Woman of the Seine
She was dragged from the Seine with not a scratch or spot. Suicide they said. The body was presented behind a window and the people peered at the restful smile which sat across the features. No name came and the body rotted, it was placed in an unmarked grave, but the smile remained. An unknown pathologist had been so taken by the beauty that they decided to take the beauty. A plaster cast mould of the face was taken and a death mask made, an object to preserve the image of one deceased.
6. Dan Cooper
One afternoon a day before Thanksgiving in 1971, a guy calling himself Dan Cooper (the media mistakenly called him D.B. Cooper) boarded Northwest Airlines flight #305 in Portland bound for Seattle. He was wearing a dark suit and a black tie and was described as a business-executive type. While in the air, he opened his brief case showing a bomb to the flight attendant and hijacked the plane. The plane landed in Seattle where he demanded 200K in cash, four parachutes and food for the crew before releasing all the passengers. With only three pilots and one flight attendant left on board, they took off from Seattle with the marked bills heading south while it was dark and lightly raining. In the 45 minutes after takeoff, Cooper sent the flight attendant to the cockpit while donning the parachute, tied the bank bag full of twenty dollar bills to himself, lowered the rear stairs and somewhere north of Portland jumped into the night. When the plane landed with the stairs down, they found the two remaining parachutes and on the seat Cooper was sitting in, a black tie.
Jets, a helicopter and a C-130 aircraft had been scrambled from the closest air force base to follow Cooper’s plane. The military was called in days after the hijacking and approximately 1,000 troops searched the suspected jump zone on foot and in helicopters. The Boeing 727 used in the hijacking was flown out over the ocean and the stairs lowered and weights dropped in an attempt to determine when Cooper jumped. The SR-71 super-secret spy plane was sent in to photograph the entire flight path but no sign of D.B. Cooper was ever discovered.
5. Man in the Iron Mask
On November 19, 1703, a tomb in the Bastille’s Saint Paul Cemetery welcomed the corpse of a man who had spent almost the last four decades of his life in various prisons of France. He is without a doubt the most famous prisoner in French history, even though nobody knows why he had to spend over thirty-five years in prison, reportedly in near perfect isolation and often with his face covered.
The first known record of the man dates back to July of 1669 when Marquis de Louvois in a letter to the governor of Pignerol prison, Bénigne Dauvergne de Saint-Mars, stated a prisoner by the name of Eustache Dauger would be arriving, who was “only a valet.” This man would go on to be the “man in the iron mask.”
4. Tank Man
On June 5, 1989, one day after China’s government began violently cracking down on protestors in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, a lone man, dressed in black pants and a white shirt, decided to take action against an approaching line of military tanks, en route to suppress protestors.
In an act of nonviolent protest, the man, who to this day remains unidentified, calmly walked in front of the procession of tanks, forcing the lead tank to halt. As the tank tried to move around him, the man repeatedly shifted his position, continuing to block the progress of the tanks and creating a symbolic gesture of opposition that still holds power today.
3. Gil Perez
Gil Perez was a 16th century soldier and guard. He was a member of the Filipino Guardia Civil and worked as a guard at the palace of the Governor General in Manila, Philippines. His life was rather typical of a soldier in that place and time. He did his duty to his government and did his job regardless of any circumstances that arose during his guard duty — even spontaneous teleportation to another country.
2. Babushka Lady
The days following the assassination were a whirlwind for investigators. There was clearly too much conflicting information and too many witnesses to wade through — but the outraged public were demanding immediate answers. The shooting of the main suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald, just added to the confusion.
Eventually, as the photographs and films were developed, yet another mystery of an already puzzling crime surfaced. Clearly shown in several photographs is a woman with what appears to be a camera of some kind in front of her face, pointing at the president’s motorcade when the shots were fired. She is standing somewhat close to the street, a very good vantage point for capturing the events surrounding the shooting. Over her hair she is wearing a scarf of a tan or light brown color — the headscarf earning her the nickname of the “Babushka Lady,” a reference to a similar Russian scarf. While she appears in several photos, probably the best and closest image of the woman is from a movie taken by Marie Muchmore, a spectator of the motorcade. Unfortunately, the mystery woman has her back to Muchmore, obscuring a clear identification. She appears in several other photographs, but never clearly enough to make some kind of identification.
1. Zodiac Killer
Zodiac Killer is the nickname given to an unidentified serial killer who operated in northern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Zodiac murdered victims in Benicia,Vallejo, Lake Berryessa, and San Francisco between December 1968 and October 1969. Four men and three women between the ages of 16 and 29 were targeted. The killer originated the name “Zodiac” in an August 7, 1969 letter to the local Bay Area press, which was just one in a series of taunting letters. These letters included four cryptograms (orciphers). Of the four cryptograms sent, only one has been definitively solved.
Suspects have been named by law enforcement and amateur investigators, but no conclusive evidence has surfaced. In April 2004, the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) marked the case “inactive”, yet re-opened the case at some point prior to March 2007. The case also remains open in the city of Vallejo, as well as in Napa County and Solano County. The California Department of Justice has maintained an open case file on the Zodiac murders since 1969
Sources: Satoshi Nakamoto, Poe Toaster, Umbrella Man, The Woman of the Seine, Dan Cooper, Man in the Iron Mask, Tank Man,
Gil Perez, Babushka Lady, Zodiac Killer
Photo credit: independent.co.uk