Field Notes
Deep dives into the investigation sites, episodes, and mysteries of Expedition Unknown and Expedition X.
The Sodder Children: Five Kids Vanished in a Christmas Eve Fire That Left No Bones
On Christmas Eve 1945, a fire consumed the Sodder home in West Virginia in under an hour. Five children were never accounted for — and no trace of them was ever found in the ashes...
The Lost Franklin Expedition: 129 Men Sailed North and None Came Home
In 1845, two of the finest ships in the Royal Navy vanished into the Canadian Arctic with 129 men aboard. It took 170 years, Inuit testimony, and a robot submarine to find them...
The Tunguska Event: The Blast That Flattened a Forest and Left No Crater
On a June morning in 1908, something detonated over Siberia with the force of a hydrogen bomb, leveling 800 square miles of forest — and left behind no crater, no fragments, and a century of argument...
The Somerton Man: A Dead Stranger, a Torn Scrap of Persian Poetry, and a Code No One Could Read
In 1948 a well-dressed man was found dead on an Adelaide beach with no ID, a hidden scrap of poetry sewn into his trousers, and a page of nonsense letters that nobody has ever cracked...
The Flannan Isles Vanishing: Three Keepers and an Empty Lighthouse
In December 1900, a relief boat reached a remote Scottish lighthouse and found the lamp cleaned, the beds empty, and all three keepers gone — with one set of oilskins still on its hook...
The Dyatlov Pass Incident: The Tent Was Cut From the Inside
In February 1959, nine experienced Soviet hikers slashed their way out of their own tent and walked into a subzero night without boots. What killed them is still being argued today...
The Mary Celeste: The Ship That Sailed On Without Her Crew
In December 1872, a passing brigantine found the Mary Celeste under sail between the Azores and Portugal — cargo intact, lifeboat gone, and all ten people aboard missing forever...
The Voynich Manuscript: The Book No One Can Read
A 600-year-old illustrated codex written in a script no one has ever decoded, full of plants that don't exist and stars no astronomer recognizes — and every expert who's tried has failed.
D.B. Cooper: The Man Who Jumped Into the Rain and Never Landed
On a stormy November night in 1971, a man in a business suit hijacked a Boeing 727, collected $200,000, and parachuted into the dark over Washington — and 55 years later, no one knows where he came down or who he was...
The Lost Colony of Roanoke: The Word Carved Into a Post
In 1590, John White sailed back to the colony he had founded and left behind. He found no people, no bodies, no graves — only a single word carved into a post: CROATOAN.
Oak Island: 200 Years of Digging and Still No Answer
In 1795, a teenager found a circular depression on a small Nova Scotia island and started digging — and the hole has swallowed six fortunes, six lives, and two centuries of obsession ever since.
El Dorado: The City of Gold That Drove Men Mad
El Dorado was never a city — it was a king, a ritual, and a misunderstanding that killed thousands and launched centuries of obsession.
The Disappearance of Amelia Earhart: What the Evidence Actually Shows
On July 2, 1937, the most famous woman in the world vanished over the central Pacific — and 89 years of searching has produced evidence, but no body and no wreckage.
The Lost City of Z: Percy Fawcett's Final Expedition
In 1925, British explorer Percy Fawcett vanished into the Amazon searching for a lost civilization. A century of searches — and a hundred lives — have not brought him back out.