2020’s Most Bizarre Mysteries Left People Utterly Perplexed

Unrequested and unpurchased packages were appearing in folks’ mailboxes in all 50 states of the Union according to a July 2020 CNN report. Households in Canada and the Republic of Ireland were also the unwitting recipients of these mysterious parcels. What was in those puzzling packages? Seeds. And it appeared that the parcels had been sent from China. Curiouser and curiouser.

Was this the work of some mad guerilla gardener? Or something more sinister? Actually, the best explanation for this strange phenomenon seemed to be a kind of con known as “brushing.” That involves sending goods to random people and then using that as the basis for fake reviews on sites such as Amazon. The aim is to boost a company’s review scores. But it sure had people scratching their heads in bewilderment.

On August 30, 2020 an American Airlines pilot at the controls of a passenger jet was making his approach for landing at Los Angeles International Airport. It had been an unremarkable flight from Philadelphia until about 6:30 p.m. local time. But what the pilot spotted when the aircraft was some ten miles from LAX was anything but normal.

Flying at a height of roughly 3,000 feet, at the same altitude as the airliner, was an individual hurtling through the sky in a jetpack. And this character, by the American Airlines pilot’s estimate, was only around 300 yards from the passenger jet. To this day the identity of the daredevil, or industrial-grade moron as some might prefer, who was jetpacking in a busy flight path remains a mystery despite an FBI investigation.

Bret Hutchings was flying his helicopter across south-east Utah, engaged in a wildlife survey. The mission was to count bighorn sheep. But what Hutchings and his buddies saw prompted the pilot to tell a reporter from KSLTV, “That's been about the strangest thing that I’ve come across out there in all my years of flying.”

So what had so astonished this seasoned chopper pilot? It was a 12-foot metal pillar standing proud in the remote desert. Someone had erected this enigmatic monument among some of the red rocks typical of this part of Utah. So who, or what, had put it there? The answer to that question is a resounding, “We just don’t know.” Weirder still, just days after it was first sighted, it disappeared.

You might think that news about UFOs generally comes from people that many would describe as “cranks.” After all, how many seriously believe that little green men are piloting spaceships from far-flung galaxies to come on a visit to Earth? But in 2020, a press release about UFOs came from an entirely unexpected quarter – the Pentagon.

The good folks at the Pentagon, whom we can assume are truly serious people, didn’t use the terms UFO or flying saucer. Their preferred phrase was the rather more sober “unexplained aerial phenomena.” And what the Pentagon shared with the world were three intriguing video clips showing what just could be alien spaceships. Whether you think they are largely depends on how much you believe in the possibility of tourists from far-off planets.

Residents of Zehlendorf, a district in Germany’s capital city, Berlin, were completely bewildered by the crimes of a local thief. This miscreant only stole one type of item – shoes. And the unknown burglar took all kinds of footwear from sneakers to flip-flops, although the bandit did seem to have a particular penchant for clogs.

Then an eyewitness, Christian Meyer, spotted the elusive robber committing one of the dastardly crimes. The brazen bandit was trotting along a suburban street with two blue flip-flops. Strangely, the burglar was carrying the ill-gotten gains orally. That’s because this criminal was a fox. When Meyer tracked down the thief’s lair, he found over 100 shoes stashed there. Whether the footwear was the right paw size remains unknown.

A February 2020 story in the pages of the Anchorage Daily News described a decidedly weird, not to say bamboozling, phenomenon. Folks in and around Anchorage, a city in the south of Alaska, had reported strangely eerie noises echoing around the area. One local resident, Jamie James, described the noise, “It’s almost like a foghorn, and screeching metal on metal.”

The newspaper said the sounds had started early in the morning, building up to a peak and then disappearing. Locals described the haunting cacophony as everything from “a submarine scraping the bottom of a pool” to a “big backhoe... giving birth” or “underwater moaning.” One wit though it might be a hungry pet dinosaur sounding off. In fact, Anchorage people have been hearing these noises for at least four years. But as yet, there’s no convincing explanation.

Black holes are one of the universe’s most bizarre features. We’ll turn to the NASA website for a definition. It tells us, “A black hole is a place in space where gravity pulls so much that even light cannot get out. The gravity is so strong because matter has been squeezed into a tiny space.” And, the website points out, black holes are invisible.

But scientists have high-tech methods of observing black holes. And during 2020 at a mind-boggling range of roughly 800 million light years distant they spotted something very strange indeed. A black hole gobbled up a mysterious body – its precise identity unknown – and the explosive result was gigantic. In fact, according to National Geographic magazine, it caused a “wrinkle [in] the fabric of spacetime.” Which sounds scary, to say the least. To date, scientists are without an explanation of exactly what happened.

In January 2020 newspaper The New York Times published a tale of unsettling events in Nebraska and Colorado. Hordes of drones, the newspaper reported, were buzzing through the skies over the region. Missy Blackman summed up what many locals must have been feeling. “It’s creepy,” she said. One of three unexplained drones she’d seen had hovered right above her home for a time.

Apparently a string of reports had come into sheriffs’ offices, and according to Colorado Public Radio “hundreds” of drones had been sighted over Colorado and Nebraska as well as Wyoming. The Colorado Department of Public Safety claimed there were explanations for all but a handful of the sightings. But it dropped its investigation late in January; whether that has eased the fears of locals is unclear.

Eagle-eyed researchers spotted something potentially astonishing in the atmosphere of Venus. They believed they’d identified traces of the gas phosphine. Why is that shocking? Well, on Earth at least, this particular gas is only produced by things that are alive. The clear implication of this fact was that there might be life on Venus, or at least in its atmosphere.

This would be truly astounding since Venus is blanketed by a dense cloud of sulfuric acid and, with a temperature of 900 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s the hottest planet in the Solar System. But some scientists are skeptical of the research claiming phosphine is present in Venus’ atmosphere. The debate continues, but if Venus does harbor life, received scientific wisdom will be turned on its head – not to mention current estimates of how widespread life might be throughout the known universe.

Jerry Lee Lewis, among others, recorded the immortal rock‘n’roll standard “Whole Lotta Shaking Goin’ On” back in the 1950s. But Lewis probably wasn’t thinking of the kind of shaking that the citizens of Mobile, Mississippi and its environs experienced in January 2020. According to a WKRG News 5 report folks in that city heard a massive boom echoing through the sky, so loud that homes actually shook.

Describing the incident to the TV station, Freddie Holloway said, “My wife thought it was the wind, but when I stepped outside, it wasn’t windy. It lasted three to four seconds.” The earthquake-tracking facility at the University of Memphis could cast no light on the tremor. Local military air force stations denied all knowledge. So what was it? Sadly, the best we can do is to say, “We just don’t know.”

Strange radio signals arriving on Earth and detected by high-tech radio stations are nothing new. But a particular set of wave patterns reported by CNN in February 2020 were definitely out of the ordinary. Scientists at the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment/Fast Radio Burst Project had picked up the anomalous data. At this point, they weren’t quite sure exactly what they were seeing.

The researchers had detected a regular pattern of what are known as fast radio bursts with the signals repeated over a cycle of some 16 days. What makes the phenomenon all the more strange is that the radio waves appear to be coming from a variety of sources. Scientists continue to study these enigmatic phenomena, hunting for answers. Some of us might wonder if somebody – or something – far away is trying to make contact.

Asian giant hornets, also known as murder hornets but going by the scientific name of Vespa mandarinia, were confirmed as unwelcome arrivals in the U.S. in 2020. The two-inch critters are bad news for bees since they are capable of completely destroying a hive. What’s more, even humans are not safe from these black-and-yellow predators.

The sting of an Asian giant hornet, the largest such species in the world, can actually kill an adult. In Japan, just one Asian country where the supersized wasps are indigenous, as many as 50 people a year are killed by the deadly sting these creatures pack. But the question is, how did the murder hornets travel thousands of miles from Asia to the U.S.? So far there’s no definite answer.

Kim Jong-Un, supreme leader of North Korea’s communist dictatorship, is an enigmatic character at the best of times. But, usually, he’s far from invisible. Fawning reports on state TV and in newspapers report his every factory opening and missile launch. So when he disappeared from public sight for about three weeks in 2020, the world sat up and took notice.

The North Korean leader’s absence was first noted when he missed the celebrations for his grandfather, Kim Il-Sung’s birthday on April 15. This is a key date in the North Korean calendar since Kim Il-Sung was the founder of the Kim dynasty. Rumors swirled around the world that the ruthless autocrat currently acting as head of state was in the midst of a serious health crisis. But after three weeks he eventually appeared to open a new fertilizer factory. His absence has never been explained.

A massive financial fraud scandal exploded over Europe in 2020. A major German payments processing firm called Wirecard suddenly announced that its balance sheet was, to say the least, seriously unbalanced. In fact, the company's finances were light to the tune of a cool $2 billion. Unsurprisingly, the institution collapsed, leaving its top executives in deep trouble.

One of those senior managers was the chief operating officer Jan Marsalek, an Austrian national. The authorities would dearly like to speak to him about the missing $2 billion. But a few days before Wirecard had gone public with the news of the absent cash, Marsalek had disappeared. And nobody knows where the man is. If you see him, could you please phone the German police?

Of course, 2020 was not by a long chalk the first year that the mysterious Loch Ness Monster had hit the headlines. In fact, the first documented claim of a monster in Scotland’s Loch Ness dates back to 565 A.D. when mention of it was made in a biography of St. Columba. Even earlier than that, the pre-Roman native Scots inhabitants known as the Picts were carving stone images of a large beast with flippers. But in 2020 new evidence apparently showed something unexplained in the 23-mile long lake, which reaches depths of almost 800 feet.

The Strathspey & Badenoch Herald newspaper headlined an October 2020 article with “Loch Ness Monster experts left stunned after another sonar sighting.” The man who captured the fresh images was Ronald Mackenzie of Cruise Loch Ness, a firm which runs boat trips on the lake. Keeping alive the idea that there’s a monster lurking in the depths might perhaps boost visitor numbers. We’ll say no more.

The word octopus, coined in 1758, comes from the Greek and means eight-foot. As a descriptive term it’s right on the money since, as everyone knows, octopuses have precisely eight legs. But it turns out that on rare occasions they have one extra limb. Perhaps we should create a new name for such rare specimens. The Greek for nine is ennea, so perhaps enneapus? Or if Latin’s your thing, maybe nonapus?

One nine-legged octopus came to light in November 2020 in a trap off north-eastern Japan’s Shizugawa Bay. Kazuya Sato was the fisherman, and he took his catch home where his mother started boiling the unfortunate creature for dinner. But as she started to cook, the matriarch realized that the mollusk had nine legs. Instead of eating it, they sent it to the Shizugawa Nature Center. So, rather than a meal, the deceased octopus became an exhibit.

Stars shine in the night sky, and barring cloud cover we expect to see the same ones day after day. But what if one suddenly disappeared altogether? That would be surprising to say the least. Yet that’s exactly what happened in the case of one distant stellar object. Astronomers were astonished to observe, or more accurately fail to observe, a particular heavenly body and reported the loss in June 2020. The star is, or was, in the 75-light year distant Kinman Dwarf galaxy, part of the Aquarius constellation.

The star was what astronomers call a luminous blue variable. Researchers had previously studied this huge boiling mass of hydrogen, 2.5 million times brighter than our Sun, from 2001 to 2011. But when they went back to look for it almost a decade later, it was gone. Researchers hypothesize that the star may have collapsed into a black hole or faded in intensity, meaning it could now be hidden by an intervening cloud of space dust. But no one’s entirely sure of its fate.

Early on a June morning, residents of the Japanese city of Sendai woke up to find a weird apparition hovering over their metropolis. This unidentified flying object in the sky loomed over the city, looking rather like something massive, pale and inflated. Adding to the mystery, reports said that it had two propellers attached to it.

This strange object hung in the sky over Sendai for a number of hours before it moved slowly off in the direction of the Pacific Ocean. So what was it? Some said it resembled a weather balloon, but Japan’s Meteorological Agency denied all knowledge of it. Others thought it might be something sinister sent by the North Koreans. To date, no convincing account of the origin of this bizarre balloon has been offered.

Think of an erupting volcano. An image of a conical mountain with red hot lava pouring from it and rocks exploding into the air is likely to come to mind. But there is an entirely different type of volcanic activity that involves absolutely zero molten rock. Instead, this volcano has temperatures that are well below freezing.

Yes, ice volcanoes are actually a thing. One of the places you can see them is on the shores of Lake Michigan and they did indeed appear there in February 2020. How does an ice volcano work? Mounds of ice with a conical profile form at the edge of frozen lakes. The flow of water below creates pressure and this forces jets of liquid from the top of the ice hillocks. So a winter wonderland can include such “volcanic” displays. Who knew?

Theft of valuable artworks is a perennial problem for museums, galleries and private collectors. An empty plinth or a blank space on the wall is all that’s left of your valuable oeuvre after thieves have visited. That’s exactly what happened at the Ricci Oddi Gallery in Piacenza, Italy back in 1997. Robbers made off with a 1917 masterpiece by revered Austrian artist Gustav Klimt titled Portrait of a Lady.

Or at least that’s what the gallery staff thought. But something extraordinary turned up in 2020 hidden within a wall in the gallery grounds. It was the Klimt painting. But why had thieves apparently moved the painting to a hiding place within the gallery’s gardens? Were the crooks disturbed? Did they plan to come back later to pick up the Klimt but failed to do so for some reason? We’ll probably never know.