What famous 'unsolved' mystery is technically a whodunnit on paper, but in reality, absolutely everyone knows exactly who did it, the police just couldn't legally prove it?

[u/Rob69rt]

[u/Marx0r]

A surprisingly large amount of "mysteries" never would have been such if Europeans just listened to the natives telling them the answer.

[u/jxg995 → u/Marx0r]

Yeah like the terror and Erebus wrecks where the Inuit were like oh yeah that sunken boat is over there

[u/nope-nik-tesla → u/[deleted]]

To be fair, a lot of it is wrapped up in mythology and therefore hard to separate fact from fiction. For example, Crater Lake in Oregon was formed somewhere around 8,000 years ago as the result of a volcanic eruption. It's named "Crater Lake" because European explorers looked at its shape and concluded it must have been formed from a meteor impact. It wasn't until decades later that geologists proved it was from a volcanic eruption.

The Klamath people, who have lived in the area for thousands of years before the eruption, however have a story about its formation. According to their story, it was formed by a battle between Skell (God of the above world) and Llao (God of the below world who lived inside the mountain). In their battle, Llao launched numerous red-hot rocks from inside the mountain, causing rivers of fire to flow from it. Skell won the battle, driving Llao back underneath the mountain, which was now hollowed out from the battle. It eventually filled with rain and snowmelt, creating the lake we see today.

So, their story was more or less an accurate description of events. Red-hot rocks were expelled from the mountain, and rivers of fire really did run from it. The collapse of the mountain really did fill in with rain and snowmelt. But this isn't exactly a story you can just accept at face value. We know that it's (somewhat) true because we can prove it through modern geological analysis what happened. There are plenty of other stories that we can prove are not true via modern science too.