America's 60 Greatest Unsolved Mysteries & Crimes (E8, S1)

[Music] America has been plagued with unspeakable crimes and unexplained phenomena that have captured nationwide attention and intrigue demanding answers and retribution however many of these mysteries never get explained mysteries to this day that are still thwarting the best efforts of countless law enforcement and investigative teams serial killers never identified treasures lost murderers never caught and conspiracy upon conspiracy spinning into tangled webs of inconclusive evidence and unresolved truths this compelling documentary series presents a countdown of America's 60 most notorious unsolved mysteries and crimes in a dramatic compilation revealing these unanswered questions in ten fascinating episodes [Music] [Applause] [Music] moving through America's 13 to 10 greatest unsolved mysteries and crimes we encounter a secret society and two baffling tales of disappearance an American hero and a whole culture [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] dan brown's 2009 thriller The Lost Symbol takes on the world's most powerful and clandestine society the Freemasons a secret society of men with special handshakes and special phrases to identify fellow members a secret society with mysterious rituals non-members joke about but the Masons are not only a secret society they are a society that fanatically guards a secret a secret its members have closely guarded for hundreds perhaps even thousands of years a secret disguised by their strange rituals and mysterious symbols a secret the Freemasons protect so fanatically that some believe their society lies at the heart of nearly every unsolved mystery every infamous conspiracy that has happened in America in the last 300 years well I've heard a lot of theories about Masonic conspiracies arranging everything from the Illuminati and that they started the French Revolution and the American Revolution and they assassinated Lincoln and started the Civil War the Masons supposedly were linked to in some theories to Jack the Ripper's murders in London supposedly trying to cover up Prince Edward's marriage to a commoner there have been various alleged Masonic insiders that have surfaced from time to time claiming that they pray to different pagan gods and so forth and if you get high enough in the organization they take you aside and tell you that we actually worship Satan or something like that fear of the Freemasons is a fear I think of a world order the Freemasons are international so I believe that many people are concerned about the idea that if there this international body they're not constrained by being American citizens because there's Freemasons in all these different countries if you have this secret international organization that even if their ideas are for good that it's a sort of an alternate power structure that scares some people and I think the Freemasons say oh we're not a secret society we're a society that has secrets but I think secrets are somewhat terrifying to people anytime people have secrets the public or a certain percentage of the public is gonna think okay there must be even more so they must be something really bad in there that they don't want me to know about truthfully all we really know about the Freemasons is that the first Masonic lodges originated among the crafts halls of Scotland during Europe's Age of Enlightenment but some scholars believe their roots go back to ancient Egypt and the engineers who built the pyramids engineers who built monuments in ways no one forty-five hundred years later can figure out as civilization spread north and west into Europe the descendants of these early masons went with it to Greece Rome France and to England and finally three hundred years ago they came to America a place isolated from Europe a place where their secret society would finally be safe a place where it could flourish curiously America would ultimately become the world's greatest superpower the world's bastion of democracy a democracy many believe was founded and nurtured by the Freemasons have freemasons really been kind of secretly running America since America started the evidence put forward would be all the people in the government that have been Freemasons been part of this secret society George Washington was a freemason Ben Franklin was a freemason 10 to 20 signers of the Declaration of Independence were freemasons the Boston Tea Party is a freemason produced event John Hancock and Paul Revere are both Freemasons and the place where they're sort of getting up in their Indian drag if you will to go out and dump the tea off the ships is the Green Dragon tavern which is their Freemason meeting hall it isn't a far stretch to believe the Masons were responsible for founding America's democratic government the most important founding fathers were Masons George Washington Ben Franklin James Madison Thomas Jefferson John Hancock and John Adams and throughout America's turbulent history to the present day America's most powerful men have been a who's who of masons presidents James Monroe Andrew Jackson James Pope James Buchanan Andrew Johnson James Garfield William McKinley Theodore Roosevelt William Howard Taft warren g harding Franklin Roosevelt Harry Truman Gerald Ford Supreme Court justices John Marshall and Earl Warren and leading merchants and businessmen Henry Ford and IBM's founder Thomas Watson even our national anthem was written by a Mason Francis Scott Key it's only natural for the Masons to have men in positions of power in positions of power to protect the Masons closely guarded secret to go to any lengths necessary to ensure it is never revealed so what secret would be so great that it would cause a group to cross a dangerous ocean and set up camp in harsh primitive wilderness just to create a government dedicated to protecting that secret well no one who isn't a high degree Mason knows the secret is hidden away among Freemason rituals and symbols including the all-seeing eye with the pyramid the United States Seal the compass the square and the level even the city streets of Washington DC itself many people believe that the streets of Washington are designed in the freemason arc and compass and represent secret symbols inside the street plan of Washington these are rituals and symbols that only the most depth the highest echelon of masons are allowed to learn rituals and symbols that are explained only when one has studied and proven himself to be worthy supposedly they are keys to the great mystery that lies at the heart of Freemasonry a mystery they are willing to die for to kill for something that has made Masons one of the most feared secret societies in America in 1826 William Morgan found out just what it meant to go up against the Masons William Morgan in upstate New York is kidnapped and widely believed to have been murdered by the Freemasons he had threatened to reveal Freemason secrets and the result of his kidnapping is this huge rise in anti Freemasonry so people then become convinced that he's been kidnapped and killed he was killed for revealing the secrets the Freemasons are trying to keep these secrets to the point of death so American Freemasons guard a secret guard a secret no matter what it takes is it a secret that if revealed would shock the human race shock did so much that chaos would reign and civilization as we know it would crumble or is it a secret that would free humanity and usher in a golden age of peace and prosperity are American freemasons benevolent caretakers guarding us against ourselves helping humanity to survive to find out you'll have to join a very exclusive very secretive society and prove yourself and then see if you dare tell the world [Music] [Music] in America's four corner region of the desert Southwest lie the ruins of America's oldest most advanced ancient civilization the Anasazi the Anasazi sintra ckets superbly built cliff cities are equal to the wonders of the ancient world equal to the splendor of the Egyptian pyramids and the beauty of the Mayan temples but while we know a lot about the ancient Egyptians and the Maya through their descendants the Anasazi descendants are nowhere to be found all we are left with is a great mystery what happened to this advanced race where did the Anasazi go the Anasazi are probably one of the biggest mysteries of the southwest because no one knows for sure who they were what they did other than leave behind these pretty elaborate ruins they obviously had a very large civilization which has been dated back to before the Aztecs but they've been gone for so long that even the Indian tribes in the middle 1800s had no idea who they were when the Anasazi vanished all they left behind were their spectacular cities exquisite pottery and their mystifying Kiva's as a result they left us a mystery so puzzling that scientists and archaeologists have been unable to solve it for centuries who were the Anasazi and did they vanish into thin air everything about the Anasazi is mysterious even their name is from a Navajo word meaning ancient enemies where they came from is another mystery no one can answer many even claimed they were aliens all that is known is that the Anasazi arrived suddenly in the desert Southwest Four Corners region sometime around the birth of Christ the area is a dry and harsh environment hardly capable of supporting life hardly a place to call home or build an empire yet for some reason the Anasazi thrived I think the greatest accomplishment of the Anasazi during their Golden Age is that they flourished they weren't just living they flourished in an area that has always been challenging to live in environmentally you know the American Southwest today is an arid landscape with scattered resources and these folks did it in a way that that I don't think is replicated anywhere in the in North America they really did something special they were able to put and put up architectural monuments if you will that exists a thousand years later twelve hundred years later fifteen hundred years later that are still there for archaeologists to find so how could these people flourish in an environment modern-day people find nearly impossible to live in and how could they build large thriving cities at Chaco Canyon New Mexico and Mesa Verde Colorado without sophisticated tools and machinery the Anasazi didn't even have the wheel some archaeologists like Steve Nash think they have the answer the Pueblo buildings are made out of resources that you can find on the landscape these folks were using sandstone chunks of various sizes to make walls in some cases at least three feet thick and they were there were stonemasons probably who specialized in doing nothing but what we would today call brick lane what did they do for their roofing materials this is where to me it gets interesting because they use trees and they use trees of different sizes in a perfectly logical arrangement for rectangular rooms they would get the large beams the large trees for doing the cross beams and then they'd use smaller trees for the next layer and then they would use smaller branches or grasses and then put mud on top the trick is where do you get trees in the American Southwest you can drive around through Monument Valley through Mesa Verde land through Chaco Canyon land through southeastern Utah and trees aren't all that common you find them in the mountains the the people that were living in Chaco Canyon about a thousand years ago just over a thousand years ago we're making gigantic structures and one of these structures jetrel Kettle has got 250,000 trees in it where'd they get them they got them from at least 50 miles away at the choose commands and we know this from looking at the chemical composition of the tree rings in the end the wooden beams that are still found there because the chemical composition matches the chemical composition of the trees and the choose commands how were they getting those trees from 50 miles away they didn't have draft animals so they didn't have horse-drawn carts they didn't have the wheel they carried those things or floated them down a river but it's a huge labor investment that we're talking about and many times today people will think about these folks were eating out and scratching you know scratching out resources from the landscape these folks had free time and they had the ability to focus to concentrate resources somebody was inducing probably young men to spend a great portion of their adulthood doing nothing but transporting beams from 50 miles away though the explanation sounds convincing would human beings really choose to live in such a harsh environment when they could easily move someplace less forbidding why stay in the desert unless there was something special about this region and that brings us to the heart of the Anasazi mystery where did they go perhaps the answer lies in the Anasazi cliff cities in their unique underground ceremonial rooms called Kiva's Kiva's were said to possess mysterious powers they were portals to other worlds other places if this is true perhaps these Kiva's are part of the answer to the mysterious disappearance of the Anasazi civilization only 700 years ago and perhaps these Kiva's are also the key to how the Anasazi created such a sophisticated culture a culture far ahead of its time and a way of governing unlike any in the ancient world I think most archaeologists would agree that there weren't kings or rulers in the sense of the European or old world model or even Mexican and South American models but there were clearly people who held special power we could call them priests then at the height of their civilization they left as mysteriously as they appeared without a clue of where they went or even how they managed to disappear most historians believe the Anasazi simply abandoned their cities and merged with the more primitive Indians in the area but does this sound plausible would an advanced culture leave luxury and comfort to live primitively some historians say the reason lies and that the Anasazi were forced out of their homes by a Death wildung plague the loss of trade a civil war or a massive drought all of these ideas sound plausible but there are problems with these theories could there have been a massive epidemic but again there were no signs of mass graves could there have been a disruption of the trade but there was no sign that the Anasazi depended on trade could the Anasazi have turned against each other there were some folk elders have found some signs of cannibalism but again that wouldn't explain like why are they no mass graves and why didn't the victors stay on they can't find any archaeological evidence to say that any of these theories are actually valid that I think is probably what makes it a mystery we'll never be able to solve so if conventional theories don't work for these unconventional people what else is left there are a lot of theories again as to what may have happened the more outrageous ones of course is that they vanished into the ether taking them to the heavens by the gods and there are a lot of people who believe that maybe UFOs pick them up and carried them away and then maybe that's who brought them here in the first place perhaps one day they will come back come back to their magnificent cities still waiting for their return [Music] [Music] [Music] where did she go the story of in the air heart is one of the biggest mysteries of all time people are fascinated with her because she was such a pioneer she was one of the first really famous women aviators she would have been the very first woman to fly around the world if she'd actually made it the fact that she disappeared without a trace on her way to how an island in the South Pacific I think is really what has kept her story alive because we'll never know what happened Amelia Earhart was America's darling she was daring beautiful outspoken witty and perhaps the greatest thrill seeker of all time she broke into the news headlines in 1932 when she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic duplicating Charles Lindbergh's extraordinary feat earned her the Distinguished Flying Cross and the dashing nickname lady Lindy it also made her an instant celebrity the world's second biggest celebrity after Lindbergh being in the limelight was something she liked and she would take even greater risks to maintain her popularity until she decided to attempt the most daring feat of all to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe which in her own words was one flight which I most wanted to attempt a circumnavigation of the globe is near its waistline as could be it was the risk of a lifetime the greatest risk imaginable in flying at that time but from the beginning Earhart had always pushed the envelope at age 24 as a brand-new pilot she crashed her first plane just after she bought it during her solo flight across the Atlantic she pushed her Lockheed Vega into a tailspin recovering only a few feet above the waves and on her first attempt to circumnavigate the globe she ground looped her plane on takeoff and crashed on May 21st 1937 Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan took off from Oakland California in their Lockheed Electra to circle the globe 40 days later she made her final touchdown at Lai New Guinea only the last most dangerous leg of the journey remained the 7000 miles across the vast Pacific Ocean her final takeoff a take-off that would result in the biggest search the world had ever seen happened at midnight on July 2nd 1937 hours later her final message crackled across the airwaves one of the last legs crossing the Pacific she was making this very long flight across open water trying to land on a small island Howland Island of course she disappears before she ever gets there who have a vast vast area of the ocean out there but so many people searched for these ships just for weeks and weeks for any trace of the plane she was last heard on the radio on her way to the island and that was the last anybody ever heard some people claimed or believed that maybe she landed on another Island somewhere some pieces of wreckage from an old plane were found on a nearby island that maybe she died there but that doesn't explain why nobody found her well the search was going on no trace was ever found of her plane anywhere around the island in the water probably one of the biggest stories that have made the rounds is that she was actually a spy working for Franklin Delano Roosevelt 1937 one of the more intriguing theories surrounding the disappearance of Earhart is that she and her navigator Fred Noonan were spies that they're round that her round-the-world trip was really just a pretext for taking pictures of Japanese installations in the Pacific was the daring Amelia spying on the Japanese for the United States she was a close friend of the Roosevelt's and many believe that while she was on this flight she was actually spying on the Japanese who were building up their naval fleet you know prior to World War two and that she may have been shot down and captured by the Japanese and maybe that's what happened to her because again there were stories that circulated that there was a white woman who had been captured and being held prisoner by the Japanese prior to World War two there were all sorts of reports from Pacific Islanders who supposedly had seen Earhart and Noonan alive after the crash there were even reports that Earhart had become the infamous wartime disc jockey Tokyo Rose that was completely unsubstantiated most people assume that she just crashed in the ocean but I think the latest theory that she may have seen too much flying across the Pacific in 1938 and caught the Japanese fortifying some Island bases where they weren't supposed to be and that she may have been shot down or forced to land somehow and then taken prisoner and executed later so that it would avoid embarrassment of having kidnapped her but I don't think that's something that we'll ever be proved now at this late date I mean if she really was held prisoner on Saipan seven years before the American invasion I doubt there would be any recognizable remains I think what went wrong here is that Amelia Earhart was just way overly ambitious she and her husband George Putnam wanted publicity they they needed it to kind of keep the money machine going you know Amelia Earhart's career is as much about showmanship as it is about flying and I think maybe she just overreached herself a little too much on this is actually it's a great the sequence that the very end in the last communications with her they're trying to communicate with this Coast Guard Cutter the Itasca and they're calling on one frequency in the Itasca is telegraphing back at another frequency and they're not hearing it and they're trying to get them to change frequencies and and to do all this stuff to try to figure out where they should be going and you get the sense that the whole thing is kind of being done on a wing and a prayer with a little baling wire and chewing gum and it was an accident waiting to happen I don't really there been a lot of expeditions trying to find Amelia Earhart's remains and they've found bits and pieces and this and that and the other thing but the truth is the Pacific is a big ocean and those islands are really really tiny and if you don't get where you're going the chances are really good they're about 99.99% that the place you're gonna end up if you don't find the place you're going is open water you know three miles deep to the bottom and good luck she's one of those people I think that the fascination is is never gonna go away because I don't think we'll ever know for sure what happened my guess is if I had to guess the plane probably just went down somewhere and we've never found it because it's just so many miles of ocean that will never be covered and chances are that that's actually what became a familiar heart would she spy for the government of course the ultimate risk taker would we'll never know the truth of what happened to Amelia but this is one mystery that won't ever go away it is the holy grail of aviation to find out what happened to Amelia Earhart [Music] [Music] of the most famous trials of the 20th century saccharin Vanzetti Rosenberg's Alger Hiss OJ Simpson the Lindberg case stands out for its lack of political significance this was not a case about race this was not a case about politics and yet it gripped America at least as firmly as any of those other cases you had hot dog vendors lining the street where the body was found you had sightseeing planes circling the scene of the crime you had 12,000 people writing to the Lindbergh's just to tell about their dreams about the kidnapping in 1932 Charles Lucky Lindbergh was America's most well known and most beloved man an aviation hero high in the pantheon of America's super aviators the Wright brothers Amelia Earhart Chuck Yeager and Neil Armstrong five years earlier in the now-famous spirit of st. Louis Lindbergh made the first solo transatlantic flight from New York to Paris following his triumph he embarked on a whirlwind nationwide tour visiting all 48 states and 92 cities he delivered a hundred and forty-seven speeches when the tour ended Lindbergh wrote the acclaimed week a memoir of his record-setting transatlantic flight the world's first superstar he hobnobbed with the rich and famous his views were sought on everything that same year he met the beautiful and intelligent and Mauro she was the only woman that he had ever asked out on a date their courtship became America's romance and in 1929 they were married the following year they began their family with the birth of their first child Charles Lindbergh jr. and then the unimaginable happened on March 1st 1932 the nursemaid Betty Gao put 20 month old Charles Lindbergh jr. in his crib in an upstairs bedroom sometime in the next 20 minutes it happened somebody took the baby somebody used the ladder and got into the window took the baby and probably trying to keep the baby from crying because it wasn't a tiny baby it was a young enough child to be frightened by what was going on my guess was they probably accidentally smothered him trying to keep him quiet taking him out of the lawn a pretty big estate and out into the woods and then wouldn't really realize that the baby was dead tried to hide the body but not wanting to give up on this score they decided to play it out like they still had the baby take the ransom money and disappear it just didn't work out that way at 10 p.m. Gau discovered that the baby was missing from his crib Lindbergh raced to the nursery to see for himself there he discovered a ransom note dear sir have fifty thousand dollars ready twenty five thousand and twenty dollar bills fifteen thousand in ten dollar bills and ten thousand in five dollar bills after two to four days we will inform you where to deliver the money frantic to get their son back the Lindbergh's paid the ransom an intermediary gave the money to a mysterious man in a New York City Cemetery in exchange he handed over a note saying that the Lindbergh son was being held on a boat called the Nellie at Martha's Vineyard the child was supposedly in the care of two women who according to the note were innocent Lindbergh went there and searched the docks however there was no boat called the Nellie a desperate Lindbergh even flew a plane low over the boats in an attempt to startle the kidnappers into showing themselves after two days Lindbergh admitted he had been duped then the worst happened on May 12 1932 delivery truck driver William Allen discovered the corpse of a toddler only four and a half miles from the Lindbergh home Allen notified the police who took the body to a morgue and nearby Trenton New Jersey a distraught Charles Lindbergh identified the body as his kidnapped son for two years the police searched for the kidnappers they found nothing then a German immigrant Bruno Hauptmann was arrested for the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh jr. my guess is they wanted to hurry this thing along and get it over with and bring it in to this whole ordeal that had gone on for a year in a trial that was held from January 2nd to February 13th 1935 Hauptmann was found guilty as the sole murdering kidnapper and sentenced to the death penalty he was executed by electric chair at the New Jersey State Prison on April 3rd 1936 case closed right and yet Helpmann proclaimed his innocence right up until his death even when the governor of New Jersey offered to convert the death sentence to life in prison in return for a confession Helpmann refused Outman might have been in you know justice capable for the whole thing if there weren't things that tied him to it see that that's the problem I have with it I think there was enough evidence to show that he was linked to this kidnapping in some way not the least of which was the wood from the ladder that was you right out of his garage was built using that wood it seems hard for me to believe that somebody could have torn all the wood out of his garage and built a ladder out of it without him knowing about it now did he know what they were doing with it maybe not the fact that this friend of Lindbergh's who tried to make this ransom drop to this mysterious man in the cemetery and identified his hat one's voice could've been mistaken sure it's possible it could have been another man with a German accent and he that's all he heard may be assumed that it was outlet so yeah there's possibly it's possible that he could have been just you know the whole thing pinned on him but I do I honestly do think he was involved in so the Lindbergh kidnapping fascinates me for two reasons and one is that I personally believe that Helpmann was framed for the crime and that he was innocent and the other thing that intrigues me is that they could never actually prove that the Lindbergh child was killed per se the supposed corpse of the Lindbergh baby was discovered a good number of days after the kidnapping in an area that had already been searched a couple of times as I recall a trucker stopped to relieve himself or something and found this corpse in an area fairly near the home where search parties had already been through and it was so decomposed at that time that the Lindbergh's pediatrician allegedly said he could not identify the corpse as Charles Lindbergh jr. if someone offered him a million dollars it doesn't mean it wasn't the Lindbergh baby but the identification certainly is unsure years later when they finally got Hoffman there's no doubt that some of the evidence against him was manufactured for example they claimed that they found what they did find Lindbergh's phone number penciled inside Hoffman's closet but a reporter for one of the New York tabloids later admitted that he wrote it there so that he could get the exclusive story some of the board's supposedly ripped up from Helpmann attic to build the ladder didn't really match as far as the nail holes and so forth I think there was a frame-up by the New Jersey State Police to try to clear the books on the case and FBI files that have surfaced since that time even indicate that J Edgar Hoover himself thought some of the evidence was very iffy but of course somebody had to fry for it and Hoffman's story about getting the money from his adore fish who could that was then already dead in Europe couldn't be questioned laughs Kim hanging out there in the breeze there were stories that circulated that the body that was found in the woods was not actually Charles Lindbergh jr. that it was some other child that had been left out there and that the the real Lindbergh baby was carried away and never returned to the family the ransom was never collected that this child just sort of disappeared into history many historians do suspect that Helpmann did have help that there was someone inside the Lindbergh house who helped him then Berg didn't help matters he did not let police question any of the servants in the house maybe this was because he'd been taken in by some of the con men who claim to know the kidnapper maybe this was just because Lindbergh couldn't bear to imagine that someone in his household who he trusted had betrayed him whatever the reason since the questions weren't asked then we can't answer them now it could well have been an organized crime operation - I know Al Capone tried to get himself out of prison by offering to find the kidnappers and he was turned down because he was too notorious at the time there was a lot of talk at the time that the underworld some kind of bootlegging gang or something of that nature might have been involved or try to make a big score this is the same period when even gangs like Bob Barker's gang and so forth they're switching over from bank robbery to kidnapping of prominent persons so the most famous trial of the 20th century undoubtedly is also the most famous mistrial of the 20th century [Music] [Music] Oh you

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Keywords: America's 60 Greatest Unsolved Mysteries & Crimes, america's 60 greatest unsolved mysteries and crimes, Popcornflix, free movie on youtube, free full length movies to watch on youtube, Full movies English, popcornflix full movies, documentary series, America's 60 Greatest Unsolved Mysteries \& Crimes, unsolved mysteries full episodes, free full episodes, Ambrose Bierce

Id: HE9QTAYDi-o

Length: 44min 12sec (2652 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 26 2018