6 Heavy stones appeared to move across the dried lake bed, Racetrack Playa, leaving a trail behind them in the cracked mud in the remote area of California’s Death Valley National Park. This mystery of “sailing stones” puzzled scientists for years, and it was found out that rocks would get pushed by the ice sheets that melted under the wind.

The movements of the rocks were associated with space aliens, magnetic fields, and even pranksters, but nobody had ever witnessed the rocks move. 

Scientists came up with theories that claimed that the 318 kilograms of individual rocks were pushed by the winds. Others said it was the work of the dust devils. 

The trails left behind by the rocks were as long as 250 meters and were available in all patterns: straight, curvy, sharp turns, etc., which further confused the researchers. 

Every other theory was disproved when a scientist from NASA, Ralph Lorenz in 2006, created a small model of the sailing stones. He took some water, placed a stone in it, and kept the model in the freezer. After some time he took it out from the freezer and it just required a gentle breeze to see exactly the same phenomenon as the sailing stones. 

Conclusively, the buoyancy of ice caused large rocks encased in ice to move or float along the tidal beaches in the Arctic Sea. (1, 2, 3)

7 Since August 2007, a total of 21 detached feet have been found on the coasts of the Salish Sea in British Columbia and Washington. Naturally, it was assumed that the feet were of murder victims, but it later turned out that they were of people who died because of accidents or suicides. The footwear, usually sneakers, kept them buoyant to wash ashore and protected from decomposition and sea scavengers.

The first one of those feet was found on 20 August 2007 in Jedediah Island in British Columbia, Canada. Just after six days, another one was found on a different island.

The two feet were of men’s size 12. The discovery was not treated just as a coincidence. Others were discovered later on in the cities of Tacoma and Seattle. 

Rumors soon spread that a psychic serial killer was on the loose and getting bizarrely rid of his victims, but the mystery came to an end when scientific clues were gathered and real answers came to light.

After the deceased from accidents and suicides fell into the sea, the majority of their bodies were ripped and eaten by sea scavengers or just decomposed. Feet separated from the main body during this scavenging and decomposing period.

The feet were covered by sneakers or other footwear that had foam in them. The foam made the sneakers float on the water after detaching from the dead body, which kept sea animals from feeding on it, and then they got carried away by the winds to shores where they were found. (1, 2)

8 In 1944, the author of The Little Princess, Antonio de Saint-Exupery, also a French pilot, disappeared without a trace when he was on a mission from Corsica. He never made it back, leaving no evidence of what might have happened to him and the plane. Later in 1998, a French fisherman accidentally caught a silver bracelet in his fishing net with engravings of the pilot’s name. Then, in 2000, a diver search found large pieces of the lost plane.

Saint-Exupery was assigned a reconnaissance mission with the objective of collecting intelligence on German troop movements in and around the Rhone valley. He took off in a P-38 plane from Corsica on 31 July 1944 and never made it back. 

The disappearance of the famous author soon spread across the literary community and then became an international headline in no time. 

It was only in May 2000, after decades, the remains of his plane were found in the Mediterranean Sea, 230 feet deep. It was the same area where a fisherman first found his bracelet engraved “Saint-Ex.” (1, 2)

9 The locals living in the Windsor city of Canada near the US border swore they could hear a strange low-frequency sound which was referred to as the “Windsor Hum.” The mystery of the Windsor Hum was solved when a steel facility turned off its furnaces. People literally had no clue for an entire decade what the noise was until the factory shut down. 

Since 2011, Windsor has been subjected to intense speculations and investigations by governments and journalists from all sides. The noise was confirmed by the Canadian side in an investigation. The source was still unknown and became a topic for multiple debates. 

Later, the culprit was found to be a US Steel facility based on Zug Island, across the river from Windsor’s west end.

People who heard the noise described it as more of a feeling than a sound. It created uneasiness and reverberations through the listener’s body. 

The company was reprimanded for violating numerous pollution regulations between 2017 and 2019 and was also fined approximately $380,000 in total. (1, 2)

10 According to the “Pioneer Anomaly”, NASA’s Pioneer 10 and 11 probes began slowing down for no apparent reason as they sped away from the Sun. The decade-old riddle was finally solved. The heat coming from the electrical current through the probes’ instrument and power systems pushed back on the spacecraft. The process caused the spacecraft to decelerate slightly.

The Pioneers that were first launched in 1972 and 1973 used to slow down suddenly when moving toward Saturn and beyond after encountering Jupiter. 

When scientists could not reason out the cause, they even raised a possibility of some new physics that contradicted the general theory of relativity laid out by Albert Einstein. 

After studying the old models of Pioneer that showed the deceleration, a large chunk of information was collected. Then, by studying the information, the actual cause was brought forth and it was further confirmed when other spacecraft didn’t show such a sudden change in speed.

So, it was a fault in design after all, not the physics. (source)