Famous ‘unsolved’ mysteries that have been solved…from Bermuda Triangle to Shroud of Turin, and UFO crash at Roswell to Egyptian Pyramids

It’s one of the most prominent societal collapses in human history. The Mayans seemingly abandoned their complex civilization and disappeared into the Central American jungle. For centuries, people puzzled over the disappearance, theorizing everything from an internal peasant revolt, to conquest by an outside and unknown people, to a UFO holocaust.

It wasn’t until 2005 that a legitimate theory was put forward to explain what happened, a theory confirmed in 2012. The Mayan civilization collapsed due to a self-created environmental disaster. The Mayans chopped down too many trees, which reduced the land’s ability to absorb solar radiation. This made rainfall more scarce, which caused a crippling drought. The Mayans abandoned their land not due to aliens or revolt, but to find food.

Likely built sometime around 450 CE, the 23-foot-tall iron pillar found in Delhi’s ancient Qutb Complex amazed both locals and scientists because of its seeming resistance to rust. Theories about the “out-of-place artifact” abounded, with one explanation being that it was built by aliens, since local people at the time couldn’t have built such an element-resistant object.

But recent scientific analysis showed that not only was such a feat well within the capabilities of ancient people, it also revealed exactly why the pillar doesn’t rust. It’s coated with a thin layer of iron hydrogen phosphate hydrate (also called misawite), which keeps the elements out. The film likely ended up on the pillar through a combination of impurities in the iron and the primitive ovens the metallurgists were using. No ancient astronauts needed.

The “UFO” that crashed near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 wasn’t alien at all. It’s actually a high-altitude balloon designed to monitor Soviet atomic tests. However, the government’s commitment to secrecy during the Cold War left the explanation as vague as possible, allowing decades for conspiracy theorists to spread their “work.”

For millions of Christians, the Shroud of Turin is one of the most revered religious icons in the world. The shroud is a 14-foot piece of linen fabric that was purportedly used to wrap Jesus’s body for burial. Most remarkably, the shroud features a negative image of an adult male, supposedly Jesus himself. The image, some have suggested, is actually an incredibly detailed bloodstain left by Jesus’s body. Since 1578, the shroud has resided in the cathedral of San Giovanni Battista in Turin, Italy, where it attracts thousands of visitors each year.

To some, the validity of a religious icon is a matter of faith, not science. But thanks to modern carbon-dating techniques, scientists have been able to prove that the Shroud of Turin couldn’t have been Jesus’s actual burial shroud. The Bible doesn’t specify exactly what year Jesus perished, but most scholars agree it was the year 33 AD. In 1988, carbon-dating showed that the Shroud of Turin originated in the Middle Ages. Forensic scientists also examined the blood spatter patterns on the shroud and concluded they were made by someone sitting in a variety of positions, not lying flat like a cadaver.

Traditionally, churches and cathedrals like San Giovanni Battista have displayed holy relics purportedly belonging to Jesus, the saints, and other important religious figures. These holy relics weren’t just objects of worship, but also big moneymakers that attracted thousands of pilgrims, just like they do today. Like the Shroud of Turin, the provenances of these relics are impossible to prove. In more recent years, the Vatican has officially classified the Shroud of Turin as “an icon” rather than a literal holy relic.

For decades, sailors, pilots, and travelers have feared the Bermuda Triangle. This area lies in the Atlantic Ocean, and at least 50 ships and 20 airplanes have “mysteriously” vanished there. Stories about disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle area date back centuries but the name “Bermuda Triangle” was coined in 1964 by pulp science-fiction writer Vincent Gaddis, who wrote an article about it for Argosy magazine. Over the years, many theories have attempted to explain these disappearances, including Earth’s magnetic field interfering with navigational instruments; enormous bubbles of methane gas bursting on the surface of the ocean; cryptids like sea monsters or aliens; and something to do with the lost city of Atlantis.

The point is not to debunk these explanations, because the real flaw in the Bermuda Triangle theory is the premise that an unusually high number of mishaps involving ships and planes happen there. Pilot and author Larry Kusche spent years researching these disappearances, and he found that many of the reported disappearances didn’t actually occur within the Bermuda Triangle. As for those shipwrecks and plane incidents, Kusche and others like the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration have pointed out that maritime disasters occur at about the same rate within the Triangle as they do everywhere else.

Aliens seem to get a lot of credit from conspiracy theorists! Aliens didn’t help build the Egyptian pyramids, even though the stones would have been difficult to move. In 2014, physicists from the University of Amsterdam dispelled rumors by putting a method found on an ancient tomb drawing to the test. They determined that the workers hauled the massive stone blocks on a sort of sled. By pouring water on sand or slippery clay as a type of lubricant, the workers reduced the friction of their path and drag the large blocks to construct the pyramids.

For thousands of years, native Himalayans and visitors have been convinced that the Himalayas are home to a mysterious, bipedal, apelike creature called the Yeti. (Just like Pacific Northwesterners have believed in Sasquatch.) Stories of the Yeti date all the way back to the Lepcha culture in modern-day Bhutan and Nepal, and they’ve persisted into modern times. But like most cryptids, there has never been concrete evidence of the Yeti’s existence, like a living specimen or even a carcass. The best Yeti enthusiasts have been able to offer is shaky proof like footprints or samples of doubtful origin.

In 2016, a documentary film crew gathered some of these “Yeti” samples and asked a team of biologists at the University at Buffalo to examine them. The team examined a collection of hair, bone, skin, and excrement supposedly belonging to a Yeti. DNA analysis revealed the samples mostly came from either Himalayan brown bears or black bears.

Like the Loch Ness Monster, it’s most likely that people have been mistaking a relatively common animal sighting for something fantastical. The fact that so many cultures around the world have reported seeing cryptids like the Yeti means one thing: Brief encounters with apex predators can confuse pretty much anyone.

This article originally appeared in the Bored Panda