Loch Ness Monsters and Raining Frogs: The World's Most Puzzling Mysteries Solved »

Albert Jack lives in Cape Town, South Africa. He is the author of Loch Ness Monsters and Raining Frogs: The World's Most Puzzling Mysteries Solved. His first book, Red Herrings and White Elephants: The Origin Of Phrases We Use Every Day, was published by Harper in 2006.

FOOLED BY FABLES? LED ON BY LEGENDS? MYTH-GUIDED?
WONDER NO MORE, MYSTERY-PHILES: THE TRUTH IS IN HERE!

What in the world (or out of it) made those giant crop circles? Did skydiving skyjacker D. B. Cooper really get away with it? Is Bigfoot a big fake? Are ETs just BS? If you’re tired of scratching your head over persistent puzzlers like these, mystery-buster Albert Jack has the cure for your quizzical itch. He’s gone hunting for the truth behind more than thirty of the most famous and baffling conundrums in history. Did a conspiracy or a calamity kill Marilyn Monroe? Is the Bermuda Triangle a tropical tall tale? Was a dead Paul McCartney replaced by a doppelgänger? How did Edgar Allan Poe meet his doom?

In quick-witted entries on each enigmatic topic, Loch Ness Monsters and Raining Frogs offers answers certain to surprise, enlighten, amuse, and perhaps disappoint true believers. But Albert Jack never fails to fascinate and entertain as he spills the beans about the odd, the eerie, and the (no longer) unexplained.

Publishers Weekly

Though not every mystery (the movement of lead coffins in the Chase vault, the identity of robber D.B. Cooper) is solved as promised, author Jack (Red Herrings and White Elephants: The Origins of the Phrases We Use Every Day) does a remarkable job explaining a great many strange phenomena in this compulsive read. Tackling more than 30 mysteries big (the Bermuda Triangle) and small (a flat, straight stretch of autobahn that causes crashes), Jack gets right to the crux of the matter, exposing a great many hoaxes. That grainy, infamous video footage of Bigfoot? Fake. The equally grainy snapshot of a surfacing Loch Ness Monster? Most likely a bathing circus elephant. Crop circles? Less a hoax than an art form. Not everything can be traced to mischievous individuals with time to kill: the disappearance of big band leader Glenn Miller is now credited to friendly fire; the rational explanation for the disappearance of the Mary Celeste crew is just as satisfying as the numerous supernatural theories posited. Conspiracy theorists may be disappointed, but skeptics and armchair explorers will find this engrossing and witty, though probably all too short.
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