10 Riddles That Had Incredible Solutions

The human mind loves a good mystery. It is almost impossible to come across a puzzle and not want to solve it; that is just how our minds work. And while some riddles are very simple and some are almost impossible, others are simply completely unexpected and unbelievable. Sometimes the solution is even stranger than the riddle itself.

10. Irish super criminal Pravo Jazdi

In the early 2000s, Irish police had their hands full with a serial offender called Prave Jazdy. They weren't violent, but they had a total lack of respect for traffic laws. Jazdy was repeatedly fined all over the country for speeding and parking violations. And he got away with it because every time he was caught, he gave the cops a new address and a new alias.

By the time was recordedmore than 50 traffic violations , Irish police began making serious efforts to track down Jazdi and put an end to his reign of terror on the roads.

Eventually, the Irish police managed to figure out how Jazdy had evaded them for so long, yet still managed to commit traffic crimes. That’s because there was no one named Prawo Jazdy. Instead, Prawo Jazdy is Polish for “driving licence,” and every time an Irish police officer pulled over a Polish driver, they wrote something wrong as the driver’s name. An officer at the office noticed the problem, then looked through the files over the years to see how often the same mistake was repeated.

Police issued a memo in the hopes of informing officers so they don't make the same mistake in the future.

9. Mysterious night power outages in Ganeshpur village.

There are few things more annoying than a power outage, but the village of Ganeshpur in India had to deal with it regularly, with power going out for two to three hours at night. The surrounding towns were fine, and there was never any bad weather or anything typically associated with citywide power outages, so people began to get suspicious. What could cause short, regular power outages?

The residents became suspicious and began to suspect the involvement of a local electrician. So, the next time the power went out, they tracked the man down to local school , where he would secretly meet his girlfriend under the cover of darkness. He would regularly cut off the electricity so that they could meet each other without anyone knowing.

The townspeople were less than surprised and apparently beat the man, then shaved his head, and then forced to marry to his girlfriend.

8. How Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess

When you're a chess champion, people expect certain things from you. Or at least one thing, and that's the ability to win at chess. When it came to chess, Garry Kasparov was long considered the best of the best, and when IBM invented a computer called Deep Blue that could play chess at a professional level, there was some doubt about whether the machine could beat the man who was considered invincible. Kasparov himself said that he loses Not maybe. But he did.

Deep Blue made a move that confused and delighted many observers in the middle of the game, on move 44. The computer moved the rook . And there was no reason for this.

In fact, the move was neither offensive nor defensive. To most, it made no sense. Some strategists saw it as the opening salvo of a long-term strategy, the sacrifice of a minor piece as a kind of defensive maneuver in the attack. And people generally agree that Kasparov was frightened. He could not understand the computer's intentions. There were even suggestions that a human master had intervened.

Kasparov won that first round, but then lost the second game, drew the next three, and then lost the sixth, allowing the computer to claim the overall victory.

Years later, one of Big Blue's designers said that the move that confused Kasparov was nothing more than a mistake. The computer didn't know what to do because the mistake prevented it from choosing the best move, so it chose the default move—random. But it confused Kasparov enough, and made him think the computer was much smarter than it actually was, that it never recovered.

7. The Extraordinary Long Life of Pierre Joubert

The world is fascinated by the extremely long-lived, so when it turned out that To Pierre Joubert 113 years old, that was one hell of a feat. And that was back in 1814! His age was authenticated by census takers for the Canadian government, and it was considered real. So how did a man turn 113 in 1814? Well, he didn't.

It turns out that Pierre's father was also named Pierre. They mixed up the documents when determining the age of the younger one, and he and his father were turned into one person. His father was born in 1701, but died when he was 65 years old The younger Joubert was born in 1732, which means he would have died at 82. Which is old, sure. But it's definitely not 113.

6. The mother who failed the pregnancy test

You don't often hear about a woman failing a pregnancy test, but it can happen. And you might assume that means the woman was faking the mother. That's what Lydia Fairchild went through in 2002. She applied for welfare, which required proof that everyone in her family was related. But her DNA test showed that her children weren't hers. She was charged with fraud, and she almost lost children But she knew they were hers.

It turns out Fairchild was genetic chimera . Her mother likely had two fertilized eggs that would have created fraternal twins, but one absorbed the other, leaving the second set of genetic material inside Fairchild's body. As a result, she was able to prove her case in court and keep her children.

5. Simultaneous explosion of dozens of sea mines near Vietnam

In 1972, in the water off the coast of Vietnam exploded at the same time dozens of sea mines . The pilots in the area had seen nothing at all that could have triggered the mines, but the sheer number of mines exploding at once indicated that it had to be something big. The cause remained a complete mystery for many years.

Fast forward to 2018, and scientists have an explanation. These naval mines relied on magnets as part of their trigger mechanism, as the magnets allowed them to attach to the hulls of boats and detonate. A strong enough solar storm could interfere with the magnetic triggers, causing them all to go off at once.

Research shows that there was a disturbance in the days before the explosions. increased solar activity , and other countries have also suffered from magnetic interference. The military even suggested a solar storm was the cause before burying its research.

4. The Mysterious Tomato from Surtsey

One of the great things about a volcanic island is that if you explore a newly formed island, you are literally discovering new land. That's almost impossible to do these days. So when scientists got to volcanic island , which had only been around for a few years at the time, you can imagine there was some excitement. And it turned into a major mess when a tomato plant was discovered there.

A handful of scientists discovered a plant that wasn't grown there and called in Agust Bjarnason, whose job it was to observe the vegetation on an island southeast of Iceland. He arrived and noticed that it looked like a tomato, but it couldn't be one because the two-year-old island couldn't have native tomatoes.

Bjarnason continued his investigation, moving rocks to discover a tomato growing out of something soft , which he then poked before realizing what had happened. The scientist on the island had eaten tomatoes at some point, then gone to the bathroom in the same spot. The seed had passed undamaged through their digestive tract and managed to pass, and Bjarnason had just poked a pile of poop. Picked it up and left.

3. The Mysterious Smoke Alarm That Shot Down a 747

Airborne emergencies are especially unpleasant. You never want to be on a plane when something goes wrong that puts people’s safety at risk. So when a Boeing 747 flying from Sydney, Australia, to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, encountered a mysterious accumulation of smoke in the cargo hold, the pilots, for obvious reasons, had to accept it for an emergency landing.

The plane landed in Bali after a smoke alarm went off. The alarm came from the cargo hold, where the plane was carrying colossal 2186 sheep When authorities investigated, they found no fire, and it turned out that the smoke wasn't what was setting off the alarms. Instead, the airline discovered that if you seal more than 2,000 sheep in a metal tube with poor ventilation, the methane from their farts can be volatile enough to set off the fire alarms, and that's exactly what happened.

It took several hours to effectively clear the air and make the plane ready for flight again.

2. Blue honey produced by French bees

If you really love honey, you know that it can be bought in many different forms. From clover honey to buckwheat honey to manuka honey and so on. They are the result of honey bees collecting nectar from different types of plants, and the end result can have noticeable differences in color and taste. But these variations are usually not very dramatic, and the color differences range from light yellow to dark yellow and brown.

When did bees in France start producing blue honey , it was certainly a mystery, as historically bees have not done this. The honey began appearing in 2014 in Alsace, and there were some concerns that pesticides or other chemicals might be to blame.

Beekeepers and other researchers had to explore the area and managed to find the source about 2.5 miles from where the apiaries were located. The plant that processed the waste Mars plant , in this case the colorful shells of old M&Ms, were raided by bees, who feasted on the candy shells and ended up producing colorful but completely unsaleable honey.

1. The tempo of Beethoven's handwritten music is too fast

Musicologists and historians have puzzled over the tempo of Beethoven's music for years. The tempo markings on his sheet music don't really make much sense, and many people ignore them. Nearly half of his 135 original notes recorded at such a strange tempo that most people consider it simply wrong.

How could one of the greatest musicians in history be so skilled at composing and writing music and yet so completely screw up his own tempo? After years of research, the answer seems to be that Beethoven didn't screw up his tempo, his metronome did. Like, his metronome probably just broke, or he just misread it.

Part of the problem probably arose because metronomes did not exist when Beethoven began writing music. But after they were invented, he liked the idea so much that he went back and added tempo marks to his older symphonies, and they seem to make no sense at all, indicating that the music must be too fast. If the metronome had been turned off, or Beethoven simply did not understand how to read the relatively new invention, his tempo markings would have been meaningless, which is apparently what happened.