Episode list

On August 16th, 1942 the US Navy airship the L-8 set off on a routine mission in the early hours of the morning. When the ship returned to the California coast nearly 5 hours later the crew had mysteriously disappeared.

A man is found dead on the coast of Australia, of unknown causes with a mysterious code in a hidden pocket, causing an international, six-decade long search for his identity, and for someone who can break the code.

A Cold War mystery, featuring the CIA, Howard Hughes, a sunken Soviet sub and quite possibly a sunken American sub too.

In 1999 Ricky McCormick was killed on the side of a freeway, 12 years later the FBI finally asks the public for help in decrypting a cypher found in his pants pocket. Ricky wrote them and to this day no one is really sure what them mean.

An annoying buzzer sounds on an open mic for 40 years. Out of Russia. Often, the buzzer stops, and that's where we start Thinking Sideways.

Kaspar's sudden appearance from nowhere in Nuremberg, Germany, touched off controversies that lasted for decades. Was he a child of royalty, stolen from the cradle and robbed of his birthright? Or a homeless kid who was kind of a con man?

In the last 50 years over 600 dogs have jumped from the Overtun bridge, many not surviving the fall. What is leading these animals to jump, from 50 feet up, to their doom?

Pipes older than fire show up in a humanly inhospitable mountain top. Bonus talk of Aliens and a pyramid.

The Stones of Carnac-a vast arrangement of menhirs in lines thousands of meters long, the purpose of the stones is an ancient mystery. Another mystery is the fate of the society that built them, which vanished without a trace.

The 1918 pandemic, known as the Spanish Flu, killed 50-100 million people, somewhere between 3%-5% of the world's population at the time. What made this flu strain so deadly, how did it spread so fast, and where did this strain come from?

On October 21, 1978 20 year old Frederick Valentich piloted his Cessna across the Bass Strait. He and his plane were never seen again but the final six minutes of his life were recorded in a conversation with the airport tower.

Two apparently healthy men are found dead, wearing very suspicious lead eye masks, near Rio de Janeiro. All signs pointing to their plan to return home, so what happened to them?

A group of Russians who were very experienced ski-hikers were discovered to have died on the slopes of the Mountain of Death, some of them frozen to death and others dead from massive physical trauma.

The Ourang Medan was found with the entire crew dead by rescue ships then blew up and sank to the bottom of the sea. What killed the crew and what caused the explosion?

In the spring of 1946 an unidentified serial killer attacks 8 people in the small town of Texarkana. As every law enforcement agency available tries to track the murderer down he disappears without leaving any clues as to his identity.

In 1997, in a remote point in the south Pacific Ocean, just west of the southern tip of South America an incredibly powerful ultra-low-frequency noise is picked up by hydrophones monitored by the NOAA.

In late 1930, the inhabitants of an Inuit village in Canada's Northwest Territories disappeared without a trace, leaving food, clothing, guns and more behind. What evil caused them to flee-or, perhaps - took them?

In post WWII Germany the Colorado potato beetle began decimating crops. Did the US dropped them there as a form of biological warfare, did they just happen to accidentally invade, or was it someone else?

In Philadelphia on February 25th, 1957 a would-be peeping tom discovers a box with the body of a young boy in it. The boy has never been identified, despite diligent work from many different organizations.

In 1970, the partially burned corpse of a woman was discovered near Bergen, leading to one of the most intensive investigations in Norwegian history, with allegations of espionage and cover-ups.

A near-earth-object that was seemingly metallic and approximately 10 meters across went past the earth in 1991. Instead of looking like a piece of space rock it showed characteristics of a "made" object. It looks like it could have been made by an intelligent species, did we send it or did someone else?

In 1939, a new curator takes over the National Museum of Iraq, bringing to light a confusing discovery- a ceramic pot with a metallic rod inside.

One mystery has plagued us since childhood- how does he carry all those toys? How does he make it to everyone's house in one night? Why has no one seen him delivering toys?

In 1942, the Free French Navy submarine Surcouf departed Bermuda via the Panama Canal. She never reached the canal, and disappeared without a trace, leading to accusations of conspiracy and betrayal, along with the Bermuda Triangle angle.

A new arcade game arrived in Portland Oregon in 1981 but was pulled from arcades just weeks after it arrived. It's never been seen again.

Gobekli Tepe is a prolific discovery and dates to a time when humans were literally mere decades from being cavemen. Who built these, how did they build them, why did they build them?

Six weeks after the JFK assassination, a KGB agent who had been working for the CIA defected to the US, claiming to have information about Lee Harvey Oswald. Yuri Nosenko's defection eventually led to purges in the CIA and still haunts the agency, with allegations of cover-ups of information relating to the assassination, and hints at the possibility of a mole in US intelligence.

The body of Elisa Lam was discovered in a water tank on the top of the Hotel Cecil in Los Angles on February 19th, 2013. How she got there, why she was there, and what happened to her in the days before her death are still unknown. The only thing that is known for sure is that she was alive on the 1st of February exhibiting unusual behavior. What happened to this girl?

December 18th, 1996, an unidentified woman commits suicide in the children's section of a cemetery. She leaves two $50 bills to cover the cost of cremation. She was found on a clear plastic sheet, next to the sheet was a Christmas tree, adorned with gold balls and red ribbons. All signs point to her perhaps being well off. Despite this, she has never been identified.

The ghost ship Mary Celeste was found in December 1872 in the Atlantic Ocean west of Portugal, with her lifeboat gone and the crew missing.

In the summer of 1483 the 12 year old boy king of England, Edward V, and his 9 year old brother Richard, Duke of York, were moved into the Tower of London by their uncle the future king Richard III. The boys were never seen alive again. Bones were found in the Tower of London 200 years later that are believed to be theirs but the real question is what happened to them and whodunit?

In August 2007, a severed foot in a running shoe washed up on a beach on the Salish Sea (in Canada). Since then, 12 more feet have been found.

In April 1943 a woman's skeleton was discovered in a hole in a hollow tree in England; months later, mysterious graffiti began to appear which gave the corpse a name.

The Viking Ulfberht swords, made between 800-1000CE, were the most prized and advanced pieces of weaponry in the Viking arsenal. No one knows how the Vikings got them or who really made them.

Since the early 1980's, linoleum tiles have been found embedded in asphalt all around the world. They bear the inscription "TOYNBEE IDEA, IN MOViE '2001,RESURRECT DEAD, ON PLANET JUPITER". Their origins are unknown.

Team Sideways tackles the maddening mystery of how a jumbo jet loaded with hundreds of passengers could simply - vanish. Without a trace.

Strange round stones are being found in a mine in South Africa, they typically have 1 to 3 ridges around their circumference and predate the material surrounding them.

On August 15th, 1977, Jerry Ehman was working on a SETI project when he detected a 72-second long blast that crescendo-ed in a noise 30 times louder than the background. Jerry circled the text recording of this noise, commenting "Wow!" next to it in red pen, inadvertently naming the phenomenon. Nothing like it has been recorded since.

In June 2011, a team of Swedish treasure hunters discovered a 200' wide saucer-shaped artifact at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Is the Baltic Sea Anomaly a natural formation, something man-made, or - a spaceship?

The Voynich Manuscript, written about 500 years ago in an unknown script, has eluded all attempts at deciphering it. What does the text mean? What do the illustrations actually represent? Where did it come from? Thinking Sideways looks at it from every angle and enlists the help of Dr. Stephen Bax in trying to understand what it is all about.

In the early 1800's a hotel owner was entrusted with a locked box, when he eventually opened it he found that it contained 3 coded messages. The coded messages were supposedly described the location of a buried treasure. Only one of the cyphers has been broken. The answer to the others, like the treasure itself, has never been found.

A mysterious "humming" noise is being heard by people world wide. So far the source of this constant, and potentially maddening, noise remains undiscovered and unexplained.

An old Polish intelligence file reveals the confession of a Nazi war criminal that the Germans were developing something which might have changed the course of WWII. Was the Nazi Bell a super weapon? An anti-gravity device? A time machine? And where did it disappear to?

This week we look at three smaller mysteries that are similar and try to get to the bottom of things.

At around 3am on February 25th, 1942, the US Army began firing at an unknown object, or possibly multiple objects, over Los Angeles. After half an hour of intense shelling the firing stopped and when the smoke cleared nothing was found. No enemy aircraft. No enemy wreckage. No enemy casualties. If there was nothing there then what were they firing at?

In 1518 in Strasbourg, Alsace, a woman began dancing in the street and danced for 4 to 6 days. Within a month, 400 people were dancing in the streets. Many died from heart attacks, stroke or exhaustion.

German man exclaims "Now I understand!" to his wife, scrawls an unintelligible word on a piece of paper. Hours later he's found naked and near death in his wrecked car. Turns out he was injured by being RUN OVER by a car.

A British professor has published photographs showing what he says are proof that fairies are real. Are they though?

Often referred to as America's stone henge, the Georgia Guidestones are a set of monolithic structures that were erected in Georgia in March of 1980. There are five slabs, which are astronomically aligned and have 10 "new world commandments" carved into their surface in several languages. An additional stone tablet, which is set in the ground a short distance to the west of the structure, provides some notes on the history and purpose of the Guidestones. The stones were commissioned by a man who's identity has never been revealed.

A man calling himself Albert Johnson led the Mounties on their biggest manhunt ever, performing almost superhuman feats of evasion and survival before he was eventually brought down.