4 Asian mysteries which remain unsolved
If you haven’t caught The 9th Life of Louis Drax in theatres yet, you should - it’s a gripping mystery that delves into the power of one’s subconscious mind and the sixth sense.
Psychologist Dr Allan Pascal (played by 50 Shades of Grey star, Jamie Dornan) investigates the bizarre circumstances behind a 9-year-old boy’s near-fatal fall.
The movie is a work of fiction, but strange incidents like what it depicts are hardly isolated to film and television. Here are four bizarre mysteries from right here at home in Asia, which have yet to be solved till this very day.
SS Ourang Medan
(Photo: Epoch Times)
In February 1948, ships along the Straits of Malacca picked up a disturbing distress call, which said, “All officers including captain are dead, lying in chartroom and bridge. Possibly whole crew dead.”
This was followed by a series of illegible Morse code, before a final chilling message came through.
“I die,” the last message said.
Ships nearby immediately responded to the call, pinpointing the vessel as a Dutch steam freighter, the SS Ourang Medan, and a boarding party was assembled to reach the vessel.
What they saw aboard the SS Ourang Medan would be etched in their memories forever - the entire crew, from the captain to the communications officer, were already dead.
But that wasn’t all. Each and every single one of the corpses bore petrified, wide-eyed expressions, with arms spread apart as if they were clutching at thin air. The boarding party decided that they would haul the ship back to the nearest port.
Almost right after tethering the ship to their own using a tow line, however, the SS Ourang Medan exploded with frightening force, breaking the line and sinking swiftly to the bottom of the ocean.
And we haven’t even gotten to the strangest part yet: while there were several written reports of the distress call as well as eyewitness accounts, researchers, on the other hand, were never able to trace the origins, owners, or official records for the SS Ourang Medan.
There have been many theories surrounding this curious case, ranging from botched shipments of hazardous materials, UFO encounters, or even ghost pirate ships attacking the ship.
However, we may never find out what really caused the ship and its crew to fall to their watery graves on that fateful day in 1948. Some, however, believe the entire story to be a hoax.
Geylang Bahru Murders
(File photo: Yahoo Singapore)
Husband Tan Kuen Chai and his wife Lee Mei Ying ran a school bus service in Singapore during the 1970s.
The couple would leave their Geylang Bahru apartment at the crack of dawn every morning.
Lee would then ring the home telephone everyday at 7am to wake her four children (aged between five to ten years old) up.
However, this would all change on one eventful morning in January 1979. On that day, Lee made repeated phone calls, but no one at home picked up and she grew anxious.
Fearing that her children would be late for school, Lee asked a neighbour to knock on her door in order to wake the kids up.
There was still no response from within the household.
Tan and Lee hurriedly returned home around 10am that morning, but it was too late - they discovered the grisly, mutilated remains of their children, slashed across the face and the arms, and stacked neatly on top of each other in the bathroom.
Investigations were launched and almost 100 people were interviewed in relation to the case, but the killer(s) were never apprehended.
The couple even received a Chinese New Year greeting card a few weeks after the murders. The card wrote, “Now you can have no more offspring, ha-ha-ha”, in Mandarin, and was disturbingly signed off as “the murderer”.
Decades may have passed since the onslaught of these gruesome, brutal murders, but the mystery still continues to fascinate and terrify the nation.
The Amomongo
Artist’s impression of the Amomongo. Photo: Cryptidz Wikia
In 2008, reports surfaced about sightings of a strange creature in La Castellana, a municipality in the Negros Occidental province of the Philippines.
The creature was described as ape-like with long talons, hairy, and as tall as a man.
It reportedly attacked two residents, aggressively scratching their faces, backs, and hands.
It also disemboweled and ate over 50 farm animals in the area.
News outlets dismissively reported the creature to be a mere “wild monkey”, but the locals believed it to be something much greater.
They referred to it as the ‘Amomongo’, a cryptid in Philippine mythology, and surmise that the reclusive creature lived in one of the many caves within the surrounding mountains.
Could the Amomongo be a distant cousin of the Sasquatch or Big Foot of the west, and the Yetis from the frigid mountains?
The creature has not been officially identified, as the 2008 incident was the one and only time the Amomongo was supposedly seen by eye witnesses.
No photographs were taken at the time either, so no one really knows what the creature truly is or if it truly exists.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
File photo of MH 370. (Photo: The Malay Mail)
This is a tale that has been repeated hundreds of times over for the past two years, and which has inspired tons of conspiracy theories, investigations, and documentaries.
In the wee hours of 8 March, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 took off from Kuala Lumpur on a scheduled flight towards Beijing Capital International Airport.
All seemed fine, until the aircraft stopped responding to air traffic control less than an hour later.
Minutes after voice contact was lost, the aircraft also disappeared visually from the controllers’ radars.
Military radar, however, continued tracking the plane for at least another hour. Their records revealed that the flight had mysteriously deviated hundreds of kilometres away westward, towards the Southern Indian Ocean.
That was also where the aircraft’s signal was last detected, and a total of 239 passengers from 15 different nations vanished from the face of the earth.
Plane parts and objects have washed up on several coasts around the suspected crash area.
Some of these are still under examination, while others are confirmed to have been from the ill-fated plane.
There are many theories as to what caused such a tragedy - some experts argued that only a crash landing would have made sense, while other conspiracy nuts discussed the possibility of an insurance scam, a hijacking, or even a rogue pilot.
But for now, the world and the grieving families have not been given any explanation for what happened.
