Love mysteries? Like reading? You’re in the right place!
I love mysteries. I always have. UFOs, Mothman, the Loch Ness Monster, the JFK assassination, whatever. I find them all fascinating. But, I find lots of the stuff about mysteries I read on the Net and elsewhere frustrating because it’s either so superficial that it doesn’t really tell me anything or I have to wade knee-deep through surmise, speculation and outright fabrication in order to try to pick out the facts. I get very tired of seeing the same second-hand “evidence” being repeated in support of a particular theory without any sort of source checking. I want to know what the mystery is, not to hear what the voices inside your head tell you or have someone bend the facts so that they can force their half-baked solution on me. This world of ours is strange enough that we don’t need to make this stuff up.
In some books and websites, this is claimed to be a genuine photograph of a Nazi flying saucer taken during World War Two. I may look at the Nazi UFO mystery on the site, but for the moment I’ll share a secret with you: There were no Nazi flying saucers during World War Two or at any other time. The real mystery here is how such utter drivel ever became credible to anybody.
I’m not a debunker. That is, I don’t approach every mystery assuming that there must be a non-mysterious solution. Life isn’t always that simple. But I like to imagine that I’m a fairly rational person, and if I’m going to be persuaded of something that seems outside the range of normal human experience, I’m going to want some solid evidence. You see, I think that a love of mysteries and especially the desire to confront things that don’t seem to fit into our conventional view of the world is something elemental. The desire to know, to understand things that seem inexplicable is a fundamental part of being human. Maybe it’s even part of what moves us forward as a species? But I also believe that this desire to understand must be underpinned with a willingness to apply logic and reason in our search for the truth, otherwise belief in mysteries and conspiracies becomes just another form of mindless dogma. If a genuine mystery exists, I am very happy to write about it. But if my research suggests that there is no real substance to a particular mystery or if some of the popularly quoted “facts” don’t seem to have a solid basis, I’m happy to say that too.
And that’s what Mystery Ink is about. I write about mysteries. Big ones, small ones, ones you may never have heard of. For each mystery I begin by providing just the facts. The stuff that’s verifiable and provable. Where possible I’ll cite sources so you can check these facts yourself. In some cases, there may turn out to be not much of a mystery at all. And maybe that’s all you’ll want to read? If you want to know more, then separately I’ll look at possible interpretations and explanations based on those facts, both my own and those of others in the field.
It doesn’t look nearly as exciting as the picture further up this page, but at least this shows the location of a real Nazi mystery in Poland. I know because that’s my bike and I went there in 2011. And yes, there is an article here on this mystery.
The articles will mostly just be words. Lots of words. Probably more words than you’re used to if you read a lot on-line. But then, most of that stuff seems to be written for people with a pre-school level of English and the attention span of a gnat. I’m sure that doesn’t apply to you and anyway, I believe that this stuff is worth spending some time on. There will be pictures too, of course, when I can find good ones, but mostly it’ll just be writing. If you find that a challenging idea, maybe you should Google “The ten most amazing mysteries in the world” right now? You won’t learn much, but at least the pages you find will be easy to read.
OK, now that the people who move their lips while reading have gone somewhere less taxing, we can go on talking about the real stuff. I can’t promise answers (because part of the definition of a mystery is that it doesn’t have a definitive answer, after all) but I will try to raise the most interesting and pertinent questions in each case and leave you to draw your own conclusions. And if those conclusions are different to mine, well, that’s just part of the fun, isn’t it? I’m pretty careful about my research but I can’t always guarantee to get everything completely right. However, I do promise not to bullshit. And if you see something in an article here that you think is wrong, let me know.
Are you ready? You are? Good! Because it’s getting dark here in the forest and I think maybe I can hear wolves off in the distance. So let’s huddle close, throw another log on the fire and start talking about the stuff that’s really interesting.
Mystery Ink 