Mysteries / Unsolved // Cold Cases
Cold Cases
Unsolved disappearances or deaths where the documentary record allows continued investigation.
ALSO KNOWN AS: Unsolved
Includes the Dyatlov Pass incident from 1959, the Sodder children case from 1945, the Somerton Man from 1948, and other cases with surviving primary documentation.
This is the broadest entry in the archive, and the one that asks for the most care. It gathers unsolved disappearances and deaths in which something about the circumstances resists ordinary explanation: an inconsistency in the record, a detail that no settled account has absorbed, a question that remained open after the official file was closed. The Dyatlov Pass incident of 1959, the Sodder children of 1945, and the Somerton Man of 1948 each sit here for that reason, and each retains surviving primary documentation that allows the work to continue.
We approach these cases as accounts of real people, not as entertainments. Every entry concerns someone who was lost and, in most instances, families who are still waiting. We do not speculate where the evidence does not lead, and we do not dramatise grief for effect.
Our method is the same as elsewhere in the archive. We set out what is documented, by whom and when; we distinguish established fact from later embellishment; and we cite the trail behind every claim. Where a mundane explanation is well supported, we say so. Where the record genuinely leaves the matter open, we say that too, and no more.
CASE FILES
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CS-26007 // Eckernförde, Schleswig (present-day Schleswig-Holstein, Germany) // tagged
The Count of Saint-Germain — the Man Who Refused to Die
The Count of Saint-Germain was a real eighteenth-century courtier, musician, chemist and diplomat of unknown origin who moved through the courts of London, Paris, The Hague and Schleswig between roughly 1745 and 1784, and who let it be believed he was centuries old. His death is recorded in the church register of St. Nicolai, Eckernförde, on the twenty-seventh of February 1784. The immortality is legend; the man, his court activity and the bafflement of his contemporaries are documented in letters, diplomatic records and memoirs.
CONFIDENTIAL -
MY-26003 // Griswold, Connecticut, United States
The Connecticut "Vampire" Burial (JB55, Griswold)
In 1990, gravel quarrying in Griswold, Connecticut exposed an early-19th-century burial in which a middle-aged man's skull and thigh bones had been rearranged into a "skull and crossbones" pattern years after death — an apotropaic act tied to New England's tuberculosis-driven "vampire" folk belief. Brass coffin tacks read "JB55". In 2019 a forensic DNA team identified him, with putative confidence, as John Barber.
CONFIDENTIAL -
UF-26010 // Godman Army Airfield, Fort Knox, Kentucky, United States // tagged
Thomas Mantell Incident
On the seventh of January 1948, Captain Thomas F. Mantell of the Kentucky Air National Guard died when his F-51D Mustang broke up during a high-altitude climb in pursuit of an unidentified object seen over Godman Army Airfield, Fort Knox. The US Air Force attributed his death to oxygen deprivation; Project Blue Book later identified the object as a then-classified Skyhook research balloon. The case survives in the Blue Book files held by the US National Archives and is one of the earliest deaths connected to a UFO sighting.
CONFIDENTIAL -
CS-26002 // Pasadena, California, United States // tagged
Jack Parsons — Occult Rituals, the Agape Lodge, and the 1952 Death of a JPL Founder
Jack Parsons (1914–1952) was a self-taught rocket chemist central to the Caltech group that became NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who also led a Pasadena Thelemic occult order. He lost his Top Secret clearance in 1952 after an FBI investigation into documents removed from Hughes Aircraft, and died on the seventeenth of June 1952 in an explosion in his home laboratory, attributed by authorities to fulminate of mercury. Murder and suicide theories persist but are unsupported by any primary record located here.
CONFIDENTIAL -
MY-26001 // Northern Urals, Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia (Soviet Union)
Dyatlov Pass Incident
Nine experienced ski-hikers from the Ural Polytechnic Institute died under unexplained circumstances on the eastern slope of Kholat Syakhl in February 1959. The case was officially reopened by Russian authorities in 2019.
CONFIDENTIAL