The last known thylacine died in Hobart in 1936, but reports of striped animals in the Tasmanian bush have never stopped. Researchers have now tried to put numbers on those sightings.

In January 1954 a run of dead dogs and newspaper talk of a ‘vampire’ beast brought up to 1,000 armed hunters to the swamps around Bladenboro, North Carolina. A bobcat was trapped and put on show, but even the mayor was not sure it was the killer.

Since December 1981 people in a small Norwegian valley have reported lights that hover, flash and race away. Radar, cameras and a university observatory have measured them, yet plasma, ball lightning and a valley-sized battery all remain contested explanations.

In June 1934 a trunk at Brighton station held the remains of a young woman who has never been identified. The hunt for her killer led police to Violette Kaye’s body at Kemp Street. Her partner was acquitted, and 42 years later he told a newspaper he had killed her.

For more than a century a 25 kilometer island called Sandy Island sat in the Coral Sea on charts, atlases and Google Earth. In 2012 an Australian research ship passed the spot and found water more than 1,400 meters deep. Here is how a whaler’s 1876 sighting became a digital ghost.

In 1946 the US Navy sent 13 ships and about 4,700 men to Antarctica. Online legend says they went to destroy a secret Nazi base. The Navy’s own report and a peer-reviewed study show what the expedition really did, and how the myth was built.

On April 6, 1966, children at a Melbourne school watched an object in the sky that some say landed in nearby bushland. The local paper called it a mystery. Sixty years later the witnesses still want an answer.

In 1931 a silent stranger built a cabin on the Rat River. Weeks later he had shot two Mounties and led police on a 48-day Arctic chase. DNA tests on his remains still could not say who Albert Johnson really was.