For two months in 2001, rain the colour of blood fell over southern Kerala. An alga explains the colour completely. What it doesn't explain is how fifty thousand kilograms of spores climbed into the sky and came down, again and again, red.

On a cloudless March morning in 1876, chunks of what looked like fresh meat rained onto a Kentucky farm. Two men tasted it. The laboratory answer was stranger than anyone expected.

Marco Polo blamed desert spirits; Darwin heard a hill the locals called 'the roarer.' At around 35 sites the sand really does boom one deep note - yet the physicists who can trigger it on command in a lab still cannot agree on why it sings.

A storm so reliable that sailors navigated by it, a nation put it on a flag — and legend says it won a naval battle. Lightning 28 times a minute, up to 160 nights a year. Then, in 2010, it vanished. Science can forecast it better than it can explain it.

Thirteen days before a magnitude-5.9 earthquake struck Quebec in 1988, witnesses watched a pink-purple globe of light drift along the St. Lawrence River. Science has catalogued 65 such cases since 1600, and still cannot agree on what they are.

In February 1959, nine experienced Soviet hikers slashed open their tent from the inside and fled, half-dressed, into a night of lethal cold. More than sixty years later, science has an answer - but not everyone believes it.

In 1970 a burned body was found in a valley near Bergen — every label cut from her clothes, eight false names in her wake, and a coded notebook in her luggage. Half a century and a modern forensic investigation later, no one has been able to give her back her name.

A haunting elevator video, a body found in a rooftop water tank, and an official ruling of accidental drowning. The coroner's file is closed; the questions about the Cecil Hotel never were.

In December 1872, a merchant ship was found gliding across the Atlantic in good order — cargo intact, table set for daily life, and not a soul on board. Ten people had vanished without a trace.

He hijacked a Boeing 727 with perfect manners, collected $200,000, and stepped off the aft stairs into a stormy November night. Half a century of suspects, particles and buried cash later, the question stands: who was the man in seat 18?

Twelve years, four seabed hunts and 239 unresolved fates: the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 remains aviation's greatest mystery.

In December 1900 a relief ship reached a remote Scottish lighthouse and found the door shut, the lamps cleaned and ready, and all three keepers gone without a trace.