Over the course of every year, it seems, news emerges that promises to finally put to rest some longstanding mystery that has stumped us for ages only to fall short once again and 2016 was no different.
Most notably this year were a pair of stories surrounding the infamous Bermuda Triangle purportedly being solved, beginning with claims that a crater in the Arctic Ocean may somehow explain the disappearances of ships and planes nearly 5,000 miles away.
Apparently, because this explanation wasn't enough, a subsequent story emerged six months later that blamed the notorious vanishings on hexagonal-shaped clouds.
Despite being trumpeted far and wide as a breakthrough in understanding the events blamed on the Triangle, the 'solution' was subsequently dismissed by the very scientist who inadvertently got linked to the hypothesis.
Similar classic mysteries also had their annual moment in the sun during 2016 as a new suspect for Jack the Ripper was proposed and a new clue in the Amelia Earhart mystery was suggested.
With it being the 45th anniversary of his infamous skyjacking, D.B. Cooper loomed over the news throughout the year with the FBI closing their investigation into the case, a filmmaker suing them for their files, and an online project launching to 'crowd source' an answer to the legendary cold case.
Another aviation mystery that may someday stand alongside these iconic cases is the disappearance of Flight MH370. Despite the discovery of new debris from the doomed airliner, little in the way of answers emerged over the past year and prospects for the future don't look particularly promising.
Similarly, the modern phenomenon of mystery booms and sounds continued to become an increasingly prevalent enigma making news in a myriad of locations from California to Maryland as well as New Jersey, the Black Hills, Oregon, and off the coast of Canada.
And a surprise mystery that briefly flirted with being solved only to plunge back into realm of the unknown was the case of a nuke lost in 1950, thought to have been found this past November, but disproven a few weeks later.
On a more promising note, there were a handful of studies that strongly contributed to possibly unlocking the mystery of Namibia's 'Fairy Circles,' the Nazca Spirals of Peru, Captain James Cook's lost ship the HMS Endeavour, and the legendary 'Tully Monster' of Illinois.
Fortunately, should any of these mysteries be solved, the void left behind can be filled by weird cases that emerged this year involving a very strange island in Argentina, a baffling boulder located in Bosnia, and the true identity of Wrinkles the Clown.