The MV Joyita
In October 1955, a merchant vessel named MV Joyita set sail from Samoa for a two-day voyage to Tokelau Islands, carrying 25 people ( including a doctor, a family of 4 including 2 children and a business man) and a cargo of timber and empty oil drums. Four days later, its destination port sent out a message that the ship had never arrived. No distress signals had been received -- the Joyita had just vanished.
So everyone went bananas and a big mission to find the boat was oraganised to find the boat, and it was, a month later, with no one on board. The Joyita was flooded and tilting to the point of being partially submerged. The recovery party noted that the radio was discovered tuned to 2182 kHz, the international marine radiotelphone distress channel. However, it only had a range of about 2 miles due to messed-up wiring that had gone unnoticed
The boat's logbook and navigational equipment were missing, as were the dinghy, all three lifeboats and all the food. So the crew must have left when the ship started leaking because the radio was useless right? It would appear to be that way, but the ship was completely seaworthy. It had a large hole in its superstructure, indicating a collision wit h something but as the actual hull had not been breached, that was nowhere near enough to cause much harm. There was a little water inside the ship, but that was mainly due to it bobbing in the waves for weeks. If everyone had left in the lifeboats, why weren't they spotted? Remeber there were three of them and those things are designed for visibility. All the light switches were "on" on the ship so the crew left the ship at night.
But where it gets really weird: Almost all the windows on the ship were smashed, the main engine was covered with mattresses, and only one of the other engines were even working. One of the passengers was a doctor and his bag was found on the deck with bloody rags in it and most of his tools missing, plus the failing engine stopped the ships clocks at 10:25pm, who knows if that provides any insight to the case.
Given the fact that the hull of theJoyita was sound and her design made her unsinkable, a main concern of investigators was determining why the passengers and crew did not stay on board.
So what happened? Theories about everything from aliens to attacking Japs, to Cthulu , to a ship mutiny, to the captain being injured to other creepy sea-related phenomena/monsters came up. All I know is the part about the main engine being found covred with mattresses messed me up psychologically. Seriously wtf happened that night?
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"The Taman Shud Case"
6:30 am, December 1, 1948, under a street lamp at Somerton Beach in Australia the body of a dead man was found. He was not/ has never been identified. Supposedly his fingerprints/teeth resulted in no matches with anyone in Australia, the US, or anywhere else the police looked, like he never existed.
The autopsy revealed exceptional health and congestion in his brain and stomach that would have been consistent with poisoning, however there was no type of poison found inside his body.
A suitcase was found by the cops which they believed was his containing clothing, the tags had been removed from all the clothes. The dead man also had a note in his pocket that said "taman shud" which is, not only weird but the last line of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which to my knowledge is a book of Islamic-themed poetry. The words mean "finished". The line had been cut from a rare copy of the book. A man who had heard this info contacted police to say that a copy of the book had appeared in the backseat of his unlocked car the night the police believed the man died. It was the copy with that line removed. In the back of the book were coded markings which to this day have not been deciphered.
MRGOABABD
MTBIMPANETP
MLIABOAIAQC
ITTMTSAMSTGAB
There was an additional line of code crossed out by whoever wrote it.
A name in the front of the book led police to a woman who said she gave the book to a man named Boxall during WWII. They showed her the dead man and she confirmed it was him. Case solved.. Until Boxall was actually found to be alive and perfectly fine, still with the book she originally gave to him, undamaged. Coincidentally the woman who identified the man lived in Glenelg the last town visited by the dead man before he travelled by bus to his final destination. The woman asked police not to record her name as she was married and wanted to avoid scandal they complied and her identity is now also unknown.
So what happened? Who killed this guy? How was the killer and victim and others involved connected? What does the message mean, if anything? Who knows, I don't but it's weird as fvck.
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