7 Internet Mysteries That Were Actually Solved

The internet is very good at generating mysteries and historically terrible at closing them. Threads run for a decade and then die of exhaustion.

Occasionally, though, somebody finds the answer. Here are seven that actually landed, and two that never will.

1. The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet

The greatest of them all. Somebody recorded a new wave track off German radio in the early eighties and nobody, for seventeen years of searching, could identify it. The hunt began in earnest around 2007, spread across forums and Reddit, and attracted genuine music journalists. People contacted radio archivists. People made spectrographic analyses of a cassette recording.

In November 2024 a Reddit user tracked it down. The song is called Subways of Your Mind, recorded in 1984 by a German band called FEX, and the surviving members had no idea any of this was happening. One of them, in his late sixties, described the band as absolutely overwhelmed. They had been sitting quietly in Germany for four decades while thousands of strangers conducted a worldwide search for their song.

2. Everyone Knows That

A woman uploaded a fragment of a song she remembered from her childhood, sung from memory, in 2021. It was about thirty seconds long and hopelessly vague. Against every expectation the internet found it, tracing it to an obscure recording after a hunt that produced its own subculture. The reward for solving it was the knowledge that the song was fine. That was always going to be the reward.

3. The Bloop

In 1997 the American ocean monitoring network recorded an extremely loud, extremely low frequency sound in the South Pacific, powerful enough to be picked up by sensors thousands of kilometres apart. For years the internet decided, with enthusiasm, that it was an enormous unknown animal. The actual answer arrived when scientists gathered more recordings and matched the profile to icequakes, the sound of large ice masses cracking and breaking free in Antarctica. Less exciting than a sea monster. Considerably more useful for climate science.

4. The Toynbee Tiles

Hundreds of tiles embedded in the tarmac of American city streets, all carrying variations of the same cryptic message about resurrecting the dead on Jupiter. They appeared over decades with no explanation, in cities the tiler apparently never visited in person. Investigative work by a documentary team assembled a persuasive case identifying a reclusive Philadelphia man, along with a plausible method for installing them without being seen, involving a hole in the floor of a car. The tiler never confirmed it. The evidence is strong enough that most people consider the case closed.

5. I Feel Fantastic

A video of an animatronic mannequin singing in a suburban room, uploaded in 2009, which the internet promptly decided was evidence of something terrible. Theories involved bodies in the garden. The actual answer was that a hobbyist engineer had built a singing robot called Tara as a personal project, exactly as it appeared, and the creepiness was entirely a product of poor lighting and the uncanny valley. The mystery was solved by asking the man who made it.

6. Sad Satan

In 2015 a supposedly cursed game surfaced, said to have been found on the dark web, full of disturbing imagery. It generated enormous coverage. It was subsequently established that the version everybody saw had been assembled by the people publicising it, and the whole affair worked considerably better as a lesson about how a spooky story travels than as a horror game.

7. The Windows XP Hill

A gentle one to finish. The rolling green hill on hundreds of millions of screens was photographed by Charles O’Rear in Sonoma County, California, on ordinary film, with no digital manipulation of the sort everyone assumed. He was driving to see his girlfriend. The hill is real, the location is documented, and the vines that used to cover it had been removed after disease, which is why it looked like that for a brief window.

The Two That Will Not Close

For balance. Nobody has identified who hijacked two Chicago television broadcasts in November 1987 wearing a Max Headroom mask, despite a case file that has been public for decades. And nobody knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is, though a great many people have been accused, and at least one has spent years denying it in court. Some threads stay open. Those two look permanent.