On February 9, 1855, south Devon woke to lines of small hoof-shaped prints in the snow, and some locals blamed the Devil. Letters and sketches from 1855 show the marks varied in size, stride and place, which undercuts the legend of one creature walking 100 miles in a night.

In 1895 Michael Cleary told his Tipperary neighbors that the sick woman in his bed was a fairy changeling, not his wife. Days later she was dead. Did he truly believe the old stories, or did he use them to explain away a killing?

On December 9, 1965, a fireball crossed the sky and Kecksburg residents said something came down in the woods. An Air Force memo says searchers found nothing, and a NASA records lawsuit decades later turned up nothing on the case.

In 1945 SS men rowed heavy crates out onto Lake Toplitz and sank them. Divers later raised millions in forged British pounds made by Jewish prisoners. But did the SS also sink gold or secret files that are still down there?

For decades Martin Bormann was reported alive in South America. A skeleton found in Berlin in 1972 and a DNA test in 1998 tell a different story, though a few skeptics kept asking about red clay on the skull.

In 1903 a doctor, a bank cashier and other respected residents of Van Meter, Iowa, said they fired on a winged monster with a glowing horn. Days later, some of their neighbors called it pure fabrication. But did the town really face a monster, or did one local writer make the whole thing up?

In April 1943 the B-24 Lady Be Good flew home from a raid on Naples and never landed. In 1958 she turned up almost intact deep in the Libyan desert. But did she fall victim to bad luck, or to a navigation error nobody on the ground thought to question?

In 1935, RAF officer Victor Goddard said he flew over a derelict Scottish airfield and saw it as it would look in 1939. Airfield records and later research suggest a more ordinary explanation.