All 109 case files
Taihoku, Japanese Taiwan · 18 August 1945 · Still open
He boarded a Japanese bomber on 18 August 1945. Officially, he never landed.
Verdict: The Government of India's position is that Bose died in the 1945 crash. The Mukherjee Commission's contrary finding was rejected the day it was tabled and has never been answered point by point, and the DNA test that both sides invoke has still not been performed. Officially closed, factually contested, and now resting on evidence that may no longer exist.
Tashkent, Soviet Union · 11 January 1966 · Still open
He signed the peace that ended a war and was dead in a Soviet villa hours later. Nobody performed a post-mortem.
Verdict: Officially a heart attack. No inquiry report has ever been published, the one committee that looked at it left no traceable record, and the 2018 order to disclose produced nothing. As a matter of documented fact rather than belief, this is still open.
Mont Blanc, French Alps · 24 January 1966 · Partly solved
Thirteen days after the Prime Minister died, the father of India's nuclear programme flew into an Alpine peak.
Verdict: Settled officially as controlled flight into terrain caused by crew error, and sixty years of recovered wreckage has produced nothing that contradicts it. The sabotage claim has no evidence behind it. What keeps the case alive is the timing, and a glacier that is still returning the aircraft piece by piece.
Bombay 1985 to 1988, Calcutta 1989 · Still open
For years someone crushed the skulls of sleeping pavement dwellers in two cities. Nobody ever saw his face.
Verdict: All cases are officially unsolved and inactive, in both cities. Nobody has ever been charged. The murders predate DNA-era forensics in India and investigators have acknowledged that there is nothing left to work with.
Dhaka, Calcutta and London · 1909 to 1946 · Partly solved
Twelve years after the prince was cremated, a holy man walked into Dhaka. A thousand people swore it was him.
Verdict: Legally resolved in the claimant's favour by the Privy Council in 1946 and never reopened. Historically it is still argued over, and the events of 1909 that started it were never investigated as a crime by anyone.
Mughalsarai station, Uttar Pradesh · 11 February 1968 · Still open
He boarded a night train as party president. He was found beside the tracks, 750 feet from the platform.
Verdict: Officially closed as a death during a robbery. Both men accused of killing him were acquitted, so in law no killer was ever established, and the only conviction was for taking his belongings. Calls for reinvestigation continue and no government has ordered one.
Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir · 23 June 1953 · Still open
He crossed into Kashmir without a permit and was jailed without trial. Forty-three days later he came home in a coffin.
Verdict: Formally uninvestigated to this day. There is no autopsy, no inquest and no inquiry report to argue with, only competing accounts, which is precisely why the argument has never ended. Demands for the detention records to be declassified continue.
Roopkund, Uttarakhand · about 5,000 metres · Partly solved
Every summer the ice retreats and hands back more of the dead. They did not all come from here.
Verdict: Partly resolved, and the resolution made it stranger. DNA and radiocarbon dating settled the timeline and destroyed the single-disaster story, but the cause of death is unestablished for every group and the Mediterranean presence has no explanation at all.
Kodinhi, Malappuram district, Kerala · Still open
One small village produces twins at six times the national rate. No one has been able to say why.
Verdict: Still open. The genetic explanation is favoured and untested in public, the definitive study has not appeared, and the numbers everyone quotes come from a village association rather than from a health survey.
Jodhpur, Rajasthan · 18 December 2012 · Still open
A blast shook the whole city. There was nothing in the sky and nothing on the ground.
Verdict: Still unexplained. Plausible natural candidates exist, none was ever confirmed, and no Indian agency has published data or offered a finding. It sits in the file as an event with a thousand witnesses and no cause.
Jatinga, Dima Hasao district, Assam · Partly solved
On dark monsoon nights the birds come down out of the sky and do not fly away again.
Verdict: Largely explained and widely misreported. The birds are not committing suicide, and the mechanism is understood in outline, but why it happens with such precision at this one spot has still not been properly modelled. Kept in the archive because the myth is repeated far more often than the finding.
Kottayam and Idukki, Kerala · July to September 2001 · Partly solved
For weeks the rain fell red and stained clothes pink. One published paper blamed outer space.
Verdict: Explained as algal spores by the government investigation and by later work. The extraterrestrial claim is not an open question. What is still genuinely unaccounted for is the meteorology: why a bloom of that size dispersed in that way in that single monsoon.
Kuldhara, Jaisalmer district, Rajasthan · Partly solved
Legend says the whole village walked out in a single night. Nobody has lived there since.
Verdict: Partly explained. The curse is folklore and the overnight exodus is almost certainly compressed storytelling. Why a prosperous village of four hundred buildings emptied, and why nobody ever moved back in, is a real and unanswered question.
Indus Valley Civilization · about 2600 to 1900 BCE · Still open
They left thousands of inscriptions behind. Nobody alive can read a single one.
Verdict: Genuinely open, and arguably the biggest unanswered question in Indian archaeology. A long text or a bilingual inscription would settle it in an afternoon, and in a century of excavation neither has turned up.
Padmanabhaswamy Temple, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala · Still open
Five vaults gave up a fortune in gold. The sixth has never been opened for an inventory.
Verdict: Genuinely unknown, because it has never been opened for an inventory, the record of earlier openings is disputed, and the Supreme Court has expressly left that decision to the temple's own committees. The serpent-curse stories and the trillion-dollar valuations are speculation, not inventory.
Kailasa temple, Ellora, Maharashtra · about 756 to 773 CE · Partly solved
They carved an entire temple downward out of one cliff. A single wrong cut could never be undone.
Verdict: The method is understood and the tools are known, so this is not a mystery of technology. The logistics, the timespan and the planning process are genuinely debated by people who study it for a living, and that part is unresolved.
Mehrauli, Delhi · about 400 CE · Busted
A 1,600-year-old iron column stands in the open air of Delhi. It has barely rusted.
Verdict: The rust resistance is solved and the paper explaining it is public, so the popular version of this mystery is over. The manufacturing achievement, and the question of whether it was one-off or routine, is what is actually still open.
Baghpat district, Uttar Pradesh · about 2000 to 1800 BCE · Still open
Copper-clad vehicles and coffins came out of the Ganga plain. The fight is over who rode them.
Verdict: Open, and unusually politicised. The artefacts are not in dispute and the dating is not seriously challenged. What they mean is contested, and the contest is not only archaeological.
The Ghaggar-Hakra belt, northwest India · Partly solved
The Rigveda praises a mighty river running from mountain to sea. There is no such river.
Verdict: Partly answered at best, and still argued on both the geology and the textual identification, and the two questions keep being answered with each other. Claims that the Sarasvati still flows underground today are folklore, not hydrology.
Dwarka and Bet Dwarka, Gujarat · surveys 1983 to 1990 · Still open
Divers off Gujarat mapped walls, bastions and dressed blocks on the seabed. Then the arguments began.
Verdict: Real submerged structures, genuinely disputed dating. The archaeology is solid and the identification with the legendary city is not established. Kept open because the dating question is answerable and simply has not been answered.
Son Bhandar caves, Rajgir, Bihar · about 3rd to 4th century CE · Partly solved
A carved doorway leads nowhere. Beside it is an inscription said to be the password.
Verdict: The treasure is legend and there is no evidence of a chamber behind the door. The undeciphered shell script is a real open problem in Indian epigraphy, which is why this file stays open rather than busted.
Noida, Uttar Pradesh · 16 May 2008 · Still open
Two people were killed in one flat in a single night. Every suspect has been cleared, and nobody stands convicted.
Verdict: Legally unresolved. The Talwars stand acquitted, the CBI's appeal and the appeal by Hemraj's family are pending before the Supreme Court, and no fresh investigation has been ordered. In legal terms this remains an unsolved double murder.
East Delhi · May 2001 · Busted
For two weeks a city of millions armed itself against a creature the police say never existed.
Verdict: Closed as mass hysteria, and now a textbook case in the Indian psychiatric literature. No arrest was ever made, most likely because there was nobody to arrest. It stays in the archive because it shows how fast a city can manufacture a monster, which is a more useful thing to know than whether the monster was real.
Burari, north Delhi · 1 July 2018 · Partly solved
Eleven members of one family died on the same night. Eleven diaries had been filling up for eleven years.
Verdict: Closed, with no foul play by any outside party established or suspected. It is now a landmark case in Indian forensic psychology. What cannot be answered, and what the file is careful not to guess at, is what was going on inside each of eleven people's heads.
Purulia district, West Bengal · 17 December 1995 · Still open
An aircraft flew low over Bengal villages and dropped hundreds of rifles into the fields. India still does not officially know whose it was.
Verdict: Legally unfinished after thirty years. Holck remains in Denmark, wanted in India, and Danish courts have refused extradition twice, most recently in August 2024. Everyone who could be tried has been tried, pardoned and released. The central question of who ordered it is officially unanswered.
Seven states of north India · June to October 2017 · Busted
Hundreds of women across north India woke to find their braids cut off.
Verdict: No prosecution for braid cutting was ever brought anywhere in India. The Agra lynching was prosecuted as murder. The episode is now studied alongside the Monkey-Man panic as a modern Indian mass hysteria event, and it is in this archive because the deaths it caused were entirely real.
Eastern Uttar Pradesh · summer 2002 · Busted
Villagers described a glowing thing that came down in the dark and clawed at faces.
Verdict: Officially explained as mass hysteria combined with natural phenomena. No case was ever solved because no culprit was ever found to exist. It sits in the archive next to the Monkey-Man because the two together show how quickly this happens in India, and how much it costs.
Bay of Bengal · 22 July 2016 · Partly solved
A military transport with 29 aboard vanished from radar over the sea. Its wreck was found only in 2024, 3,400 metres down.
Verdict: The wreck was located in January 2024, which resolved where the aircraft is and nothing else. The cause remains officially undetermined, the recorders are still on the seabed, and no recovery operation has been announced.
Delhi to Isfahan · 1635 to 1747 · Partly solved
The most expensive object ever made in India left Delhi on the back of an invader, and then stopped existing.
Verdict: Almost certainly destroyed, and undocumented in its destruction. That combination is why it is only partly solved: there is no record of it ending, only a record of it ceasing to be mentioned.
Kollur mine, Golconda · last seen 1747 · Still open
A French jeweller described the largest diamond India ever produced in 1665. Nobody has proved they have seen it since.
Verdict: Open, and unusually clean as an open question: a specific object, described and drawn by a named witness on a known date, which then simply stops existing in the record. Every identification with a surviving diamond is speculation.
Tamil Nadu to New York · 1980s to 2020s · Partly solved
A Madison Avenue gallery owner was quietly running a hundred-million-dollar pipeline. It ran out of village temples.
Verdict: Documented in court records and seizure inventories, so the crime itself is not the mystery. The open question is how many idols are sitting in private homes around the world with nobody looking for them, and no list to look against.
Southeast Asia to Tokyo · 1945 to 1952 · Still open
Indians across Southeast Asia gave up their jewellery for the cause. About a tenth of it reached Delhi.
Verdict: Genuinely unaccounted for, and unusually well documented as an accounting problem rather than a legend. Worth separating clearly from the argument about how Bose died: this is a question about gold, and it has its own paper trail.
Victoria Dock, Bombay · 14 April 1944 · Partly solved
A ship exploded and threw gold bars across the city. People were still finding them sixty-seven years later.
Verdict: Partly traced. The popular claim that a fortune in Fort Stikine gold still lies under Mumbai is overstated. The books, however, have never been formally closed, and the last recorded recovery was well inside living memory.
Seringapatam, Mysore · 4 May 1799 · Partly solved
British agents arrived to count Tipu Sultan's treasury. The jewels had already gone.
Verdict: Partly traced. The loss here was dispersal through a documented process rather than concealment, which makes it harder to romanticise and much easier to verify. The unquantified part is what went missing in the hours before anyone started counting.
Across India · audited from 2013 · Partly solved
India's national auditor went looking for the country's protected monuments. Dozens of them were not there.
Verdict: An administrative mystery rather than a romantic one, and arguably more consequential than any buried-gold story because it is still happening. The most honest summary is that India does not currently agree with itself about how many of its protected monuments still exist.
Hyderabad and London · 1948 to 2019 · Solved
One nervous transfer in the last weeks of princely Hyderabad froze a fortune for seventy years.
Verdict: Legally resolved in 2019 and unusually well documented, since the judgment is public and can be read. The mystery was never where the money was. It is why it was moved, by whom, and on whose authority, and that has still not been answered.
Alwar district, Rajasthan · 17th century · Busted
A government signboard forbids entry after sunset. The internet has its own reason why.
Verdict: The ghosts are folklore and the signboard is about wildlife, darkness and broken masonry. The genuine and much less discussed question is why a fortified town of ten thousand people emptied out entirely and was never reoccupied.
Between Leh and Khalatse, Ladakh · Busted
Put your car in neutral here and it rolls uphill.
Verdict: Fully explained as an optical illusion, and unusually well closed: the anomalous magnetism was not just doubted, it was measured and found to be ordinary. The hill is still worth stopping at. It is simply a trick of the eye rather than a trick of physics.
Konark, Odisha · 13th century · Busted
A 52-tonne lodestone said to hold an idol in the air and pull ships' compasses off course.
Verdict: The magnet is legend and the Portuguese story has no documentary basis. What deserves the attention instead is the temple's real astronomical alignment and its carving, both documented, and the genuinely unresolved question of how and when the great tower came down.
Claimed to date from Ashoka, about 270 BCE · Busted
Nine sages, chosen by an emperor, guarding the knowledge too dangerous to release.
Verdict: Modern fiction presented as ancient history, with a clear and traceable paper trail from a 1923 pulp novel to a 1960 bestseller to the internet. It is in this archive because it is repeated as fact more often than almost anything else on the list.
Agra, Uttar Pradesh · completed about 1653 · Busted
There are locked chambers beneath the world's most famous tomb.
Verdict: The rooms are real, ordinary, structural and now photographed. The hidden-temple claim was rejected in court and answered with pictures, which is about as closed as a question of this kind gets.
Shani Shingnapur, Ahmednagar district, Maharashtra · Busted
A whole village lives without doors or locks, and says it has never needed them.
Verdict: The doorless custom is real, old and worth seeing. The crime-free reputation is not, and the police records say so. This file exists to keep the first fact and drop the second.
Delhi and worldwide · 21 September 1995 · Busted
One morning the idols began accepting spoonfuls of milk. By noon India had sold out.
Verdict: The milk was explained the same day, by capillary action, and demonstrated on camera with coloured milk. The far more interesting surviving question is how the news outran every communication technology of the time, and that part is not a joke: it is a serious case study in how information moves.
Mamallapuram, Tamil Nadu · Busted
A 250-tonne boulder rests on a bare slope. It looks ready to roll, and it has not moved in centuries.
Verdict: Not a mystery, just very good geology and a popular, unsourced story about seven elephants. It is in the archive because it appears on every mysteries list in the country, always described as impossible, and it is not.
Daundia Khera, Unnao district, Uttar Pradesh · October 2013 · Busted
A seer dreamt of a dead king pointing at a thousand tonnes of gold. The Government of India sent archaeologists.
Verdict: The dream was folklore, the dig was real, and the result was nothing. It earns its place here because it shows exactly how thin the line can be between a treasure legend and state action, and because the radar anomaly was never followed up.
Barabar Caves, Jehanabad district, Bihar · about 258 to 230 BCE · Partly solved
Ashoka's craftsmen hollowed chambers out of solid granite and polished the walls until they reflect like glass.
Verdict: The date and the builders are certain and inscribed on the walls. The technique is understood in principle and has never been properly reproduced. Claims of machine cutting have no support at all, and the unfinished cave next door is the reason why.
Central Kerala coast · about 1st century BCE to 5th century CE · Partly solved
Rome bought so much pepper here that Pliny complained. Nobody can say where it stood.
Verdict: Partly solved. The Roman-period trade at Pattanam is real, dated and important. The identification with Muziris is not established, the excavation itself became a political fight, and the story of a flood drowning the port in a single night is a later tradition rather than a recorded event.
Across northern, central and Deccan India · roughly 4th to 8th centuries CE · Still open
Conch-shaped characters are carved across half of India. Two centuries on, no one knows what a single one says.
Verdict: A real, catalogued and genuinely undeciphered corpus, and the much less famous cousin of the Indus script problem. There is no evidence for the online claim that it encodes a secret spiritual code, and no evidence yet for anything else either.
Keezhadi, near Madurai, Tamil Nadu · disputed range from about 800 BCE · Still open
Inscribed potsherds came out of a trench on the Vaigai. Then came a 982-page report and three transfers.
Verdict: Open, and simultaneously a genuine stratigraphy dispute and a political one. The settlement and the inscribed pottery are not in doubt by anybody. The date attached to the writing is, and the excavation report at the centre of it has still not been published.
Mouth of the Kaveri, Tamil Nadu · about 300 BCE to 300 CE · Still open
Tamil epics describe a city the sea swallowed. Sonar has begun finding structures off that coast.
Verdict: Open, with active fieldwork for the first time in over twenty years. The first survey phase ran in late 2025 and its results are still being analysed. Anything you read that describes the drowned city as found and mapped is ahead of the evidence.
Agra district, Uttar Pradesh · capital 1571 to 1585 · Partly solved
Every schoolbook says Akbar abandoned his capital because the water ran out.
Verdict: The popular water-scarcity explanation is largely discredited by the physical evidence of the site's own waterworks. What replaced it explains the departure in 1585 well enough, and does not really explain why nobody ever came back.
Bhojpur, Raisen district, Madhya Pradesh · 11th century CE · Still open
The masons downed tools so suddenly that the ramp is still lying against the temple.
Verdict: Genuinely unexplained, and unusually valuable because the abandonment preserved the construction process itself. This is a case where the failure is worth more to historians than the finished building would have been.
Qutb complex, Mehrauli, Delhi · early 14th century · Partly solved
A sultan ordered a minaret twice the height of the Qutb Minar. A stump of rubble is what stands.
Verdict: The abandonment is dated and reasonably well understood. The engineering question, whether it could ever have stood, is genuinely open and has never been properly modelled.
Ahmedabad district, Gujarat · Harappan, about 2400 to 1900 BCE · Still open
India teaches its children that Lothal holds the world's oldest dock. Archaeologists have argued about it for sixty years.
Verdict: Genuinely open, but moving. The monumental basin, the sluice, the warehouse platform and hundreds of trade sealings are all real and not in dispute. The word dockyard was one side of a live argument for fifty years, and the 2024 river reconstruction has strengthened that side without closing the case.
Unakoti, Tripura · dated on style to the 7th to 9th centuries CE · Still open
Faces thirty feet high stare out of a rock face in a Tripura jungle. No inscription, no chronicle, no name.
Verdict: Open. One of the largest rock-cut sites in eastern India is effectively undocumented, which is remarkable in itself and is the actual mystery here, rather than anything the legends supply.
Hire Benakal, Koppal district, Karnataka · roughly 2nd to 1st millennium BCE · Still open
About a thousand stone monuments stand on one Karnataka hill, fitted without mortar. Almost nobody knows they are there.
Verdict: Open, and under-studied rather than mysterious in any exotic sense. Local tradition calls these the houses of a dwarf people, for which there is no archaeological support. The small dolmens are simply small monuments.
Narayanpet district, Telangana · about 1500 to 2000 BCE · Still open
Eighty menhirs stand in a Telangana field. One cup-marked boulder may be a map of the night sky.
Verdict: Open, and genuinely testable, which is unusual on this page. The monuments, the cup-marks and the horse burials are all real. The promotional claim that this is the first place in the world where a constellation was recorded is a heritage-bid framing rather than a peer-reviewed finding.
Raisen district, Madhya Pradesh · occupation from the Acheulian onward · Still open
Nine small hollows are hammered into a boulder at Bhimbetka. One school of researchers says we did not make them.
Verdict: Actively disputed and not settled. The cupules are physically associated with Acheulian deposits. Their meaning and their exact age are not agreed, and the very large date figures that circulate online come from the strongest end of one research argument rather than from a consensus.
Kollur, Krishna river, Andhra Pradesh · peak 16th to 17th centuries · Partly solved
For two thousand years nearly every great diamond on earth came out of a few gravel pits.
Verdict: The mines are real, documented by an eyewitness, and exhausted. The specific origin stories attached to individual diamonds are far less certain than they are usually presented, and the curse stories attached to several of them are unverified in every case.
Karunagappally, Kollam district, Kerala · cohort study from the 1990s · Still open
One of the most naturally radioactive inhabited places on earth is a Kerala beach where four lakh people live.
Verdict: Genuinely open, and one of the most consequential open questions on this page, because the answer affects how the entire world regulates radiation exposure. The carcinogenic effect of high natural background radiation here remains, in the field's own words, unproven.
Muzaffarpur, Bihar · annual summer outbreaks documented since 1995 · Partly solved
Every May the village children went to sleep well and woke screaming with seizures.
Verdict: Largely solved, and the solution saved lives, which makes this one of the few files here with something like a happy ending. Muzaffarpur reported zero deaths in 2024. The residual questions are real but they are now questions about why an understood mechanism still varies so much year to year.
Kozhikode and Malappuram, Kerala · outbreaks from 2018 onward · Partly solved
Nipah has reached Kerala in seven of the last nine years. Nobody has worked out how the first person catches it.
Verdict: Partly solved, and still open on the single question that matters most for prevention. The reservoir is established, the human-to-human chain is understood, and Kerala's containment works. The first step in every outbreak, the one that would let anyone stop it before it starts, has never been traced.
Uddanam, Srikakulam district, Andhra Pradesh · recognised from the 1990s · Still open
In a lush coconut belt, whole villages of farm labourers are losing their kidneys.
Verdict: Still unexplained after three decades, and still killing working-age people. Similar clusters have since been reported elsewhere in India, which makes finding the answer more urgent rather than less.
Eluru, West Godavari district, Andhra Pradesh · December 2020 · Still open
Six hundred people collapsed across one town in a single week. Most were out of hospital within the hour.
Verdict: Still unexplained. Six hundred people collapsed in a single town in a week, and most were discharged within the hour. One person died, and no cause was ever established. The outbreak ended before the investigation did.
Ganges and Brahmaputra delta · roughly 1870s to 1950s · Still open
For eighty years the Bengal delta shook to cannon fire nobody could locate. Then it stopped.
Verdict: Still open, and now probably unanswerable. The phenomenon was investigated seriously in 1876 with the tools of 1876, and stopped being reported before anyone had a microphone array to point at it.
Buldhana district, Maharashtra · colour event June 2020 · Partly solved
A crater punched into ancient lava turned from green to pink over a single weekend.
Verdict: The colour change is solved and was solved within weeks. The age of the crater is not, and until it is, a well-studied impact site sitting inside India has no agreed date.
Mizoram and the northeast · recorded cycles including 1862, 1911, 1959, 2006 · Partly solved
Every forty-eight years the bamboo flowers on schedule, the rats arrive, and the famine follows.
Verdict: The famine cascade is fully explained and now partly managed, which is why 2006 did not repeat 1959. The clock inside the bamboo is a real and unsolved biological question, and not only in India.
Killari, Latur district, Maharashtra · 30 September 1993 · Partly solved
One of India's deadliest earthquakes struck a dead zone at four in the morning, on a fault no map had recorded.
Verdict: The mechanism is established and the lesson was taken seriously worldwide. The trigger is not established, and the broader question, how many other invisible faults sit under populated parts of India, is genuinely unanswered.
Koyna, Satara district, Maharashtra · 1962 to the present · Partly solved
India filled a reservoir in 1962 and started an earthquake sequence that is still running.
Verdict: The link between the reservoir and the earthquakes is accepted and has been for decades. The mechanism and its persistence are exactly what the deep borehole observatory exists to answer, and it is still drilling.
Kolar Gold Fields, Karnataka · anomalies recorded roughly 1964 to 1990 · Still open
Two kilometres under a gold mine, physicists recorded particle tracks that known physics cannot account for.
Verdict: Still open, and uniquely frustrating. The mine is flooded, the detectors are gone, and the only way to settle it now would be to find the same signature somewhere else, which in fifty years nobody has.
Indian Ocean, about 1,200 km southwest of India · found 1948, modelled 2023 · Partly solved
There is a place in the Indian Ocean where the sea sits a hundred metres lower than it should.
Verdict: A seventy-five-year-old question that finally has a serious answer, not yet independently confirmed. Worth including because the leading explanation for the biggest gravity anomaly on Earth came out of a laboratory in Bengaluru.
Dahanu and Talasari, Palghar district, Maharashtra · November 2018 onward · Partly solved
A quiet district near Mumbai has been shaken thousands of times since 2018. There is no main shock to blame.
Verdict: Partly explained, genuinely unresolved, and genuinely worrying for the people living on top of it. Thousands of earthquakes over years, in a district with no mine, no dam and no mapped fault to blame.
Vitthala Temple, Hampi, Karnataka · carved 15th to 16th century · Partly solved
Granite columns in a ruined temple ring like struck bells.
Verdict: The acoustics are fully explained and were explained by measurement rather than assertion. The historical method is undocumented, and that is the genuinely interesting part of this file.
Siang river, Arunachal Pradesh · October to December 2017 · Still open
For weeks one of India's great rivers arrived running black and undrinkable.
Verdict: Still unexplained, and a clean illustration of how a river crossing an unfriendly border becomes unknowable at exactly the moment you most want data. Nothing about the intervening years has made the next occurrence easier to explain.
Banni plains, Rann of Kutch, Gujarat · dispute 2022 to 2026 · Partly solved
A 1.2 kilometre ring in the Rann was announced as India's fourth meteorite crater.
Verdict: Actively contested, and a rare case where the less exciting-sounding answer would be the more extraordinary one. A meteorite crater is a normal thing for a planet to have. A Bronze Age furnace visible from orbit is not.
Bakreshwar, Birbhum district, West Bengal · studied from the 1990s · Partly solved
Springs in rural Bengal sit on rock as hot as a young ocean ridge, on some of the oldest crust on Earth.
Verdict: Partly explained. The helium has a good answer. The magnitude of the heat anomaly does not, and it sits in one of the least likely places on the planet for it.
Western Ghats · identified 1957, spreading since about 2011 · Partly solved
A virus sat quietly in one Karnataka forest for fifty years. Then it started crossing state borders.
Verdict: Partly explained. The framework is agreed, the specific trigger for the breakout after fifty static years is not, and the maintenance cycle that keeps the virus alive between outbreaks is still not fully described.
Joshimath, Chamoli district, Uttarakhand · crisis January 2023 · Partly solved
A Himalayan town of twenty thousand began tearing itself apart. The scientists sent to explain it disagreed.
Verdict: The underlying geology is understood and was documented in 1976. The proximate trigger is contested, the institutional findings were not published in full, and the town is still there.
Dhaka Glacier, Lahaul-Spiti, Himachal Pradesh · 7 February 1968 · Partly solved
A hundred and two men vanished into a whiteout in 1968. The mountain has been returning them ever since.
Verdict: Recovery expeditions continue. Roughly a handful of the 102 have been brought home across 2003, 2007 and 2024, the cause is officially undetermined, and the families who are finally getting answers are getting them because the glacier is melting.
Nanda Devi, Garhwal Himalaya, Uttarakhand · October 1965 · Still open
They carried a plutonium-powered generator up Nanda Devi and left it in a blizzard. In spring there was only rope.
Verdict: Still missing. Plutonium-238 has a half-life of about eighty-eight years, so whatever is up there is still hot and will be for a long time. Indian agencies have periodically tested river water and no contamination has been publicly confirmed. It is arguably the strangest object anywhere in the Himalaya.
Arabian Sea, between Muscat and Jamnagar · 25 March 1986 · Still open
A brand-new transport plane went quiet over the Arabian Sea. Nothing of it has been seen in forty years.
Verdict: The aircraft and all seven aboard are still missing. The Air Force has never published a determination. The 2024 recovery of a different lost An-32 from three and a half kilometres down in the Bay of Bengal is a reminder that this one could, in principle, still be found.
Off the Kathiawar coast, Arabian Sea · 8 November 1888 · Still open
She sailed from Mandvi with more than seven hundred aboard and left behind not one plank or one body.
Verdict: The sinking is not in doubt. The absence is. A steel ship carrying eight hundred people disappeared off a busy coast and left nothing, and maritime historians are still looking for her.
Pakistani prisons · 1965 and 1971 wars onward · Still open
India sent ninety thousand prisoners home. It has spent fifty years asking about fifty-four of its own.
Verdict: India's position, restated to Parliament in recent years, is that Indian defence personnel are in Pakistani custody. Pakistan denies it. No Indian serviceman from either war has ever been repatriated under this category, and the families are now in their third generation of asking.
Off Visakhapatnam, Bay of Bengal · night of 3 to 4 December 1971 · Still open
A submarine hunting India's only carrier went down with all ninety-three hands. The two navies have never agreed why.
Verdict: The wreck lies off Visakhapatnam and is treated as a war grave, left undisturbed. That means the physical evidence stays exactly where it is, the records on one side are gone, and the dispute is unlikely ever to be settled.
Naval Dockyard, Mumbai · 14 August 2013 · Still open
A submarine loaded with live weapons exploded at its berth in Mumbai. The inquiry report has never been published.
Verdict: The submarine was salvaged, found beyond repair and scuttled in 2017. The inquiry reports remain classified. That, rather than any doubt about the sequence of events, is why this file is open: eighteen men died and the account of how has never been published.
Near Nanda Devi East, Uttarakhand · late May 2019 · Partly solved
Eight climbers radioed that they were going for the summit at first light. A week later a helicopter found five bodies.
Verdict: The deaths are not in question and the recoveries were made at real risk to the people who made them. What is missing is any published reconstruction, so eight experienced climbers died on an unclimbed peak and there is no account of why.
Kathmandu to Kandahar · 24 to 31 December 1999 · Still open
Everyone knows India released three militants. Almost nobody can say how the weapons got aboard.
Verdict: Not a mystery in outline. The hijacking, the release and the failure at Amritsar are all documented. What remains open is how the weapons got aboard, who else was involved, and why nobody has ever been tried.
Persian Gulf, off Dubai · 8 April 1961 · Still open
A passenger ship blew apart at half past four in the morning and 238 people died. A court blamed persons unknown.
Verdict: Formally attributed to sabotage by an Admiralty court, with no perpetrator ever identified and no forensic confirmation that a device existed. Two hundred and thirty-eight people died and the finding rests on inference.
Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala · 1994 onward · Partly solved
An espionage case crippled India's cryogenic engine programme. Thirty years on, nobody has been convicted of anything.
Verdict: The fabrication is judicially established fact, confirmed by the CBI in 1996 and by the Supreme Court since. Who fabricated it, and why, is genuinely open, and the delay in answering is now longer than the careers it destroyed.
New Delhi · May 1971 · Still open
A man phoned the State Bank, imitated Indira Gandhi, and walked away with sixty lakh rupees. Ten months later he died in custody.
Verdict: The transaction, the conviction, the custodial death and the commission's criticism are all documented. Claims that Indira Gandhi personally directed the transfer have never been substantiated. What is certain is that the official version was found unsafe by a commission of inquiry and was never replaced with a better one.
South China Sea · 11 April 1955 · Partly solved
An Air India plane was blown apart in mid-air to kill China's premier. He had changed his flight.
Verdict: An Indian aircraft and Indian crew were destroyed in somebody else's assassination attempt, and nobody was ever tried for it. It is almost forgotten in India, which is its own small mystery.
New Delhi · commissioned 1963, still classified · Still open
India commissioned a full autopsy of its defeat by China. Sixty years on it is still a secret.
Verdict: The report's existence, its continued classification and the leak are all documented. Claims about specific damning conclusions in the unreleased Part Two are speculation, and that is precisely the cost of keeping it sealed.
South Block, New Delhi · January 1985 · Partly solved
When they finally traced the leak, it ran through the Principal Secretary's own office.
Verdict: The arrests, confessions and convictions are documented. The damage assessment is not, so claims about scale should be treated carefully in either direction. What is certain is that it ran for twenty-five years inside the Prime Minister's own office.
Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu · 21 May 1991 onward · Still open
The bomber and her handlers were identified within months. Twenty-six years later the court was still asking who else.
Verdict: The immediate responsibility is judicially settled and everyone convicted has now been released. The larger conspiracy remains a live legal question rather than a finding, and no wider plot has ever been proven.
Moscow and Delhi · notes compiled 1972 to 1984, published 2005 · Still open
A KGB archivist smuggled out notes naming Indian politicians. Not one name has ever been confirmed or refuted.
Verdict: Mitrokhin's defection and the notebooks are real and were taken seriously by Western agencies. The specific Indian allegations remain uncorroborated by primary Soviet documents and should not be treated as established fact in either direction.
Nalanda, Bihar · about 1193 to the 1240s · Partly solved
Everyone knows the library burned for three months.
Verdict: That Nalanda was violently damaged and ultimately abandoned is not in doubt. The nine million manuscripts burning for three months is not in the sources, and a monk was still teaching there forty years after the date at which it is supposed to have ceased to exist.
Tarain and Ajmer · 1192 CE · Partly solved
A blinded king kills his captor by aiming at sound. It is the most famous death scene in Rajput legend.
Verdict: Partly solved. How and where one of India's best-known kings died is still argued over, but the legend's ending is ruled out: Muhammad of Ghor outlived him by fourteen years and was killed by other people entirely.
Rajasthan · claimed 12th century, probably 16th · Partly solved
The epic that gave India its favourite medieval hero may have been written four centuries too late.
Verdict: A magnificent literary work that is not a contemporary historical record. Historians do not use it as evidence for the events of 1192, which is worth knowing given how much popular history, and how many films, rest on it.
Rangoon, Burma · 1862 to 1991 · Partly solved
The British buried the last Mughal the day he died, in an unmarked spot, so nobody would find him. For 129 years it worked.
Verdict: A mystery that got solved, and it is here because the solving is the point. An empire set out to erase a man's grave so thoroughly that nobody could find it, very nearly succeeded, and was undone by a drainage trench 129 years later.
Delhi and London · August 1947 · Still open
The man who drew the line that split India burned every working paper behind it.
Verdict: That Radcliffe destroyed his papers and refused his fee is documented. Claims that specific boundary changes were personally directed by others are argued by historians and cannot be settled, precisely because the papers are gone. This is the rare case where the destruction of evidence is itself the historical fact.
Bardhaman, Bengal · 1821 to the 1840s · Still open
A Bengali heir vanished and a claimant appeared. The colonial courts sent him away without looking.
Verdict: Open. There is no settled scholarly verdict on the claimant's identity, and the case is the forgotten first draft of the Bhawal story, with the ending reversed.
Nithari, Noida, Uttar Pradesh · remains found December 2006 · Still open
India's most notorious mass-killing case ended with every conviction wiped out.
Verdict: All convictions set aside and the accused released in November 2025. No suspect, no fresh investigation ordered, no answer for the families. Legally and factually, these killings are unsolved, and the state has stopped looking.
Mehsampur, Jalandhar district, Punjab · 8 March 1988 · Still open
Punjab's biggest-selling singer stepped out of his car and was shot dead in seconds. Nobody has ever been arrested.
Verdict: No arrests, no chargesheet, no active investigation, thirty-eight years on. One of the most famous unsolved murders in India, and a casualty of a period in Punjab when record-keeping itself collapsed.
Santiniketan, West Bengal · 25 March 2004 · Still open
Someone emptied the vault holding Tagore's Nobel medal. Twenty-two years on, nobody knows where it is.
Verdict: CBI case closed twice, one arrest in 2016, nothing recovered. The replicas on display are Swedish gifts. The original is either in somebody's vault or was destroyed within weeks of being taken, and there is no evidence for either.
Kaiga Atomic Power Station, Karnataka · 24 November 2009 · Still open
Radioactive tritium was emptied into a staff water cooler inside an Indian nuclear plant.
Verdict: No arrest was ever publicly announced and no prosecution is known. For an acknowledged act of sabotage at a nuclear plant, affecting dozens of workers, the silence since is the most remarkable part of the file.
South Mumbai · October 2006 to January 2007 · Still open
Seven bodies turned up on south Mumbai pavements in three months, each left beside an empty can.
Verdict: All seven deaths remain formally unsolved and no live investigation is known. Like the Stoneman two decades earlier, in the same city, the victims were people nobody was looking for and nobody kept looking for.
Talegaon Dabhade, near Pune, Maharashtra · 13 January 2010 · Still open
He named powerful men in a land scam and was stabbed to death on his morning walk.
Verdict: Closed by the CBI twice for want of evidence, contested by the family both times, no one charged. The most thoroughly investigated killing of an RTI activist in India ended with nobody accused of anything.
Madhya Pradesh · 2013 to 2015 · Partly solved
As the exam-rigging scandal unravelled, people connected to it kept dying.
Verdict: The core scam is real, heavily documented and still producing convictions, with 592 people chargesheeted and sentences handed down as recently as December 2025. The death list is where fact and rumour blur most, and this file is here as much for that reason as for the deaths themselves.
Lahore · 1849 to 1850 · Partly solved
The richest treasury in northern India was inventoried, boxed, and auctioned off within a year.
Verdict: Partly traced, and mostly through a documented process rather than a theft. The framing of certain transfers as voluntary gifts from Duleep Singh is disputed by historians on both sides of the border, for the obvious reason that he was a child under British guardianship at the time.