You were going to Google it at 2 a.m. anyway.

Unsolved murders

Murder Accountability Project

More than 350,000 homicides in the United States went unsolved between 1965 and 2024. This nonprofit tracks them, and uses an algorithm to flag clusters that might be serial killings police never connected.¹

Cold cases

Project: Cold Case

A searchable database of unsolved homicides, maintained by families who got tired of waiting.

Mysterious disappearances

NamUs

U.S. Department of Justice

The national database of missing and unidentified people. Volunteers have solved real cases by matching records here. You can search it right now.

Mysterious disappearances

The Charley Project

Profiles of more than ten thousand cold missing-person cases, written plainly and updated for decades by one woman.

Unidentified

The Doe Network

Volunteers matching unidentified remains to missing people. Some have names again because a stranger kept reading.

The hijacker who vanished

D.B. Cooper, FBI Records

In 1971 a man hijacked a plane, collected $200,000 in ransom, and jumped out the back over Washington State. He was never found. The FBI ended its active investigation in 2016.²

The mountain pass

Dyatlov Pass, 1959

Nine Soviet hikers fled their tent at night, some barely dressed, and died in the snow. Sixty years of theories later, a 2021 study modeled a slab avalanche. Not everyone is convinced.³

The lost colony

Roanoke, 1590

When the supply ship finally returned, more than a hundred colonists were gone. One word was carved into a post: CROATOAN.

True-crime discussion

Websleuths

One of the internet's biggest forums for amateur detectives. Rules against naming suspects keep it from becoming a mob, mostly.

True-crime discussion

r/UnresolvedMysteries

Reddit

Long, sourced write-ups of unsolved cases, disappearances, and unidentified people. Read the sidebar rules.

Historical criminal cases

The Old Bailey Online

The full proceedings of 197,745 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court from 1674 to 1913. Searchable. Every word.⁴

Historical criminal cases

FBI Famous Cases & Criminals

Dillinger, Capone, the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Unabomber. The Bureau's own case histories.

The files themselves

FBI Records: The Vault

Thousands of pages released under the Freedom of Information Act. UFOs, Hitler, mobsters, celebrities. Partially redacted, which somehow makes it better.

Related: File 064

Criminal subcultures

The Valachi Hearings, 1963

Joseph Valachi became the first member of the American Mafia to publicly admit it existed, on live television before the U.S. Senate. He called it Cosa Nostra. Our thing.

Notorious scams

Charles Ponzi, 1920

He promised 50 percent returns in 45 days and paid early investors with later investors' money. His name became the word for it. The trick has not changed in a century.

Notorious scams

Bernie Madoff

The largest Ponzi scheme in history ran for decades. He was sentenced to 150 years in 2009 and died in prison in 2021.⁵

Notorious scams

The man who sold the Eiffel Tower

Victor Lustig, 1925

He convinced scrap metal dealers Paris was selling the tower for scrap. He sold it once. Then he came back and tried to sell it again.

Underground marketplaces

Silk Road

The first famous dark web market ran from 2011 to 2013. Its founder, Ross Ulbricht, was sentenced to life in 2015 and pardoned in January 2025. See the U.S. Justice Department's case releases.⁶

Related: File 004

Underground marketplaces

Operation Bayonet

In 2017, Dutch police secretly took over the Hansa market and ran it for about a month, collecting evidence, while the FBI shut down its biggest rival, AlphaBay. Users fled straight into the trap.⁷

Notorious cybercriminals

FBI Cyber's Most Wanted

Real faces, real charges, real rewards. Some of them are still posting on social media.

Stay current, safely

Avoid the scams yourself

Federal Trade Commission

The FTC's running list of scams in circulation right now. Less fun than Ponzi. More useful.

Urban legends

Snopes

Fact-checking urban legends since 1994. If your uncle forwarded it, it is probably here.

Famous hoaxes

The Museum of Hoaxes

Centuries of pranks, fakes, and frauds, cataloged lovingly.

Supposed red rooms

The red room legend

VICE / Motherboard

Rumors of live-streamed torture rooms have circulated for years. Reporters who followed the announced streams found nothing but trolls and scams. Almost every site claiming to sell access has turned out to be fake, mostly designed to steal cryptocurrency.⁸

Internet hoaxes

Slender Man

Invented in 2009 for a Photoshop contest on the Something Awful forums. Within a few years, millions of people had told the story as if it were old folklore.

Internet hoaxes

The Momo Challenge

In 2019, warnings went viral about a creepy figure telling children to hurt themselves. UK child safety charities called it a hoax. The panic spread far more than the thing itself ever did.⁹

Puzzles

Cicada 3301

From 2012, an anonymous group posted fiendish puzzles across the internet, requiring cryptography, steganography, and physical posters in cities around the world. Nobody has publicly confirmed who ran it or why. You may notice the Archive has a few puzzles of its own.

The line, crossed

Swatting

In 2017, an online argument over a $1.50 video game bet led to a fake emergency call. Police went to the wrong address in Wichita, Kansas, and an innocent man was shot and killed. The caller was sentenced to 20 years.¹⁰

Investigate properly

Bellingcat

Open-source investigators who identify war criminals and assassins using public photos and data. They publish their methods so you can learn them.

Psychology of dangerous groups

The BITE Model

Steven Hassan, Freedom of Mind

Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotional control: a framework for recognizing undue influence, written by a former member of a high-control group.

Psychology of dangerous groups

International Cultic Studies Association

Research and support for former members and families. Academic, careful, and sobering.

Cult histories

The Jonestown Institute

San Diego State University

Primary sources on Peoples Temple, including recordings and documents. On November 18, 1978, more than 900 people died in Jonestown, Guyana.¹¹

Cult histories

Heaven's Gate

In 1997, 39 members died in a house near San Diego, believing they would leave Earth on a spacecraft trailing a comet. Their website is still online, maintained for decades by surviving members.

Unusual historical punishments

Peine forte et dure

Pressing a prisoner under heavy stones until they entered a plea. In Salem in 1692, Giles Corey refused, and was pressed to death. His reported last words: more weight.

Related: File 014

Unusual historical punishments

The scold's bridle

An iron cage locked over the head with a metal bit pressed onto the tongue. Used to punish women accused of gossiping or talking back. Public humiliation was the point.

Forbidden experiments

The Milgram experiment

Yale University, 1961

Ordinary volunteers were told to give increasingly strong electric shocks to a stranger. In the best-known version, about two thirds went all the way to the maximum. The shocks were fake. The obedience was not.¹²

Related: File 016

Forbidden experiments

The Stanford Prison Experiment

1971

College students played guards and prisoners. It was stopped after six days. Later critics have questioned how much of it was staged. Read both sides.

Forbidden experiments

The Tuskegee study

U.S. Public Health Service, 1932 to 1972

For forty years, the U.S. government observed hundreds of Black men with syphilis without treating them, even after penicillin became the standard cure. It ended only after a whistleblower went to the press.¹³

Forbidden experiments

MKUltra

CIA, 1953 to 1973

The CIA's mind control program. You already know where to read about it here.

Related: File 003