On 11 June 1962 three prisoners left dummy heads in their beds and paddled into San Francisco Bay on a raft made of stolen raincoats. Sixty-four years later nobody can say whether they drowned or landed.

Two women left a house in Lancaster in September 1935 and were next seen as parcels in a Dumfriesshire stream. The killer had removed everything that identifies a body. Then a team of anatomists put the bodies back together.

Four young people drove to an abandoned munitions plant in West Virginia in November 1966 and came back to town badly frightened. More than a hundred sightings followed. Then a bridge fell, and the story changed shape forever.

A landlady in Florida found the doorknob too hot to hold. Inside, a 67-year-old woman had been reduced to ash in an armchair, while the room around her was barely touched. The police chief wrote to J. Edgar Hoover for help.

In August 1955, eleven people fled a Kentucky farmhouse and told the police that small silver figures had besieged them all evening. Twenty officers searched the property. They found bullet holes, torn screens and no explanation.

A hunter found a steel drum in the New Hampshire woods in 1985. Inside were a woman and a child. It took four decades, a new science and a librarian's hunch to give all four victims their names back.

On Valentine's night 1988 a twenty-year-old woman was stabbed to death in a flat above a Cardiff betting shop. Three innocent men went to prison for it. The man who did it lived quietly two miles away for fifteen years, until a scientist scraped back the layers of paint on a skirting board.

On a freezing December afternoon in 1944 the most famous bandleader in the world climbed into a small single-engine aircraft at a Bedfordshire airfield and flew towards France. No wreckage, no bodies and no crash site have ever been found, and the argument over why is still running eighty years later.

In 2000 a gilded mummy surfaced in the Pakistani desert with a cuneiform breastplate calling her the daughter of King Xerxes. Two governments claimed her. Then a curator in Karachi worked out that she had died in about 1996, with a broken neck, and that nobody knows who she was.

In 1994 a German archaeologist walked onto a low mound in southeastern Turkey that everyone else had written off as a medieval graveyard. Under his feet lay carved stone circles raised by hunter-gatherers eleven and a half thousand years ago, and nobody can agree what they were for.

A fifteen-year-old took a shortcut home in 1983. The investigation that followed produced the world's first DNA exoneration, the first DNA murder conviction, and a mass screening that never found the man who did it.

Three men sailed out of Airlie Beach one autumn morning. Five days later their boat was found drifting 88 miles offshore, engine idling, food on the table, and nobody aboard.