10 Strange And Mysterious Men
The world is full of mysterious men that have made an impact
on history, people who have followed a secretive lifestyle and died with
unanswered questions about their true motivations. In many cases, these
people are top secret spies, psychics, serial killers, government
scientists, mafia members, assassins, or whistle blowers. The
individuals have all been tainted by bizarre accusations and
unsubstantiated claims. In response, conspiracy theories have emerged to
describe the events. Here we examine the lives of 10 mysterious men
that continue to fascinate people around the world.
10 Wolf Messing
In 1899, Wolf Messing was born in the town of Góra Kalwaria, which is
located 25 kilometers (15 mi) southeast of Warsaw, Poland. As a
teenager, Messing claimed to be a psychic. He could alter people’s
perceptions and predict future outcomes based on mental telepathy and
body language clues. During his shows, Messing would enter a trance-like
state and attempt to find hidden objects. He performed in front of
large crowds and became famous after World War II. Messing even caught
the attention of
Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud.
In 1937, Wolf Messing predicted that Adolf Hitler would die if he ever threatened Russia and “
turned toward the East.”
The message angered Hitler and caused Messing to flee to Russia, where
he continued to perform his act. As the story goes, Messing was then
forced to prove his psychic ability for Stalin by convincing a bank
teller to give him cash with nothing more than a blank piece of paper.
After the successful demonstration, Messing became a teacher for the
KGB.
Messing’s life was chronicled in an autobiography titled
About Myself.
One quote from the book says, “My ability to see the future may seem to
contradict the materialist understanding of the world. But there is not
a particle of the unknowable or supernatural about precognition.” Wolf
Messing died in 1974. Since that time, many facts attributed to his life
have been questioned and deemed unsubstantiated by historical
references—a fact which has only contributed to his mystery.
9 Adam Rainer
In 1899, Adam Rainer was born in Graz, Austria. When he was 19 years
old, Rainer was medically tested and determined to be extremely short
for his age. His height was said to be
1.4 meters (4’8″). However,
another source
says that he was only 1.18 meters (3’10.5″) at the age of 21. At this
time, Rainer was thin, weak, and showed signs of dwarfism. Despite his
short size, it was noted that he had large feet. In 1920, Rainer started
to experience a massive growth spurt. His arms, legs, hands, and feet
exploded in size and his health deteriorated. Rainer started to lose his
eyesight, and it became hard for him to eat and walk.
By 1930, Adam Rainer was two meters (6’9″) tall. It has been
suggested that he had a tumor in his pituitary gland, which caused an
overproduction of growth hormone. Rainer developed a protruding forehead
and jaw and thicker lips, which are all characteristic of acromegaly.
In the early 1930s, it is thought that he had surgery to remove the
tumor, but the operation didn’t stop the growth. Eventually, Rainer
became bedridden and died in 1950 at a height of 2.34 meters (7’8″).
The Guinness Book of World Records has listed Adam Rainer as the “most variable stature” in history. The entry says that he was the only person to be both a
dwarf and a giant.
8 Raymond Lee Harvey
On May 5, 1979, a man named Raymond Lee Harvey was arrested by the
Secret Service for concealing a loaded starter gun only 10 minutes
before President Jimmy Carter was set to give a speech in Los Angeles.
Harvey was
arrested
only 15.2 meters (50 ft) from where Carter was going to talk. After
being interrogated by the police, Harvey admitted to being part of a
four-man plot to kill the president. His role in the attack was to shoot
into the air, while another assassin killed Carter. Harvey conspired
with a 21-year-old named Osvaldo Espinoza Ortiz, who was arrested by the
police. Ortiz admitted to being with Harvey, but denied a plot to kill
the president.
Raymond Lee Harvey had a history of mental illness. His story was
initially thought to be fabricated, however, after investigators found
corroborative testimony,
the claims
were taken seriously. The assassination attempt was reported by the
mainstream media, but then quickly disappeared. Many of the details
surrounding Raymond Lee Harvey remain a mystery. After a series of
revelations, Harvey and Ortiz were held on bond, but the charges were
eventually dropped.
As you would expect, people have connected the fact that the
potential assassin was named Raymond Lee Harvey and his conspirator was
Osvaldo Ortiz. In Spanish, Osvaldo is the equivalent to Oswald, which
makes the pair “Lee Harvey Oswald.” The coincidence has spawned a
series of conspiracy theories that say the assassination attempt was
fabricated in order to scare the Carter administration.
7 Karl Koecher
In 1934, Karl Koecher was born in Czechoslovakia. When he was 28,
Koecher joined the Czech intelligence agency. In the mid-1960s, he moved
to the United States and received a doctorate in philosophy from
Columbia University. Koecher then obtained a position with the CIA and
became a spy for the USSR. He is one of only a few people to have
penetrated the CIA for the Soviet Union. A large percentage of information on his life has never been revealed.
It is unclear what tipped the CIA off that Koecher was a double
agent, but in 1984 he was arrested and accused of being a spy. The CIA
attempted to make him turn against the USSR, but Koecher was eventually
deemed to be unreliable. After the FBI made mistakes in his case,
Koecher was set free. On February 11, 1986, he was part of a
spy exchange
that involved Anatoly Shcharansky. Upon his return to Czechoslovakia,
Koecher was named a hero and given a job with the government.
In 1989, it was suggested that Koecher was involved with the Velvet
Revolution, but he denied the claims. After the fall of communism in the
USSR, little information was published on his life. However, he has
been accused of being connected to the CIA. It was alleged that Koecher
was involved in a
defrauding scheme
that provided Mohammed Al-Fayed with false documents that supported the
conspiracy surrounding the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed.
6 Lawrence E. King Jr.
Lawrence E. King Jr. is the man who was at the center of the child sex
ring allegations involving the Omaha, Nebraska, branch of the Franklin
Community Federal Credit Union (FCFCU) that emerged in the late 1980s.
Despite the high-profile case, little information has been published on
King’s activities. In 1988, Lawrence King was an active Republican
politician that managed the FCFCU, which was a credit union used to help
the poor. After several tips, it began to emerge that
$38 million
was missing from the organization’s funds, which spawned an
investigation that found evidence of physical and sexual child abuse.
The sources of the reports were initially deemed credible, and
information emerged that young boys and girls from foster homes were
being transported around the country by plane in order to provide sexual
favors for rich people. A large number of victims came forward and said
that they were sexually molested. The reports were
examined
by the Executive Board of the Nebraska Legislature, and many cases of
sexual abuse were recorded. It was speculated that the abuse was
performed by prominent political figures in the Republican Party.
The allegations were investigated by two different grand juries, who found the information to be a “
carefully crafted hoax.”
Many people were shocked by the decision; they thought the accusations
were “scripted by a person or persons with considerable knowledge of the
people and institutions of Omaha.” After the decision, a Nebraska
Senator called the grand jury release “a strange document.” The second
grand jury also found the material unsubstantiated and sentenced an
alleged victim, Alisha Owen, to 9-15 years in prison for perjury.
Eventually, Lawrence King was convicted of embezzling over $38 million
and served 10 years in prison. The scandal produced a large number of
conspiracy theories that include tales of devil worship, political sex
parties, cannibalism, CIA gun smuggling, and the first Bush
administration.
5 Arnold Paole
In the early 18th century, people in southeastern Europe started to
believe in the existence of vampires. They were seen as a major problem
to society, especially in Transylvania. People took to digging up graves
and staking dead bodies that were deemed to be vampires. Some
individuals even reported seeing their dead relatives walking the
streets and attacking living people. The panic spread around Europe, and
many publications speculated on the phenomenon. Two of the most famous
examples of vampires from this time are Peter Plogojowitz and Arnold
Paole.
In 1726, Arnold Paole died in the village of Meduegna, which was near
the Morava River. Immediately after his death, people started seeing
his undead body. The situation caused panic in Serbia and officials
called for the help of two Austrian military doctors, Glaser and
Flückinger. The investigation and report produced by Flückinger was
named Visum et Repertum and
confirmed the existence of vampires.
The report said that Arnold Paole’s dead body was responsible for the
deaths of four separate people. His corpse was dug up and found to be
“quite complete and undecayed, with fresh blood from his eyes, nose,
mouth, and ears.” Based on this, it was concluded that Paole was a
vampire. His heart was staked and his body burned. Five years after the
initial outbreak, the deaths of 17 people were attributed to Paole and
vampirism. His story was published in the
London Journal on March 11, 1732, in which it was proclaimed that vampires were drinking the blood of the living in Hungary.
4 Walter Haut
In the summer of 1947, Walter Haut worked as a public information officer for the U.S. 509th Bomb Group in
Roswell, New Mexico.
On July 8, 1947, he was ordered to issue a press release announcing
that the U.S. Army had recovered a “flying disc” in the desert. The
statement was given, but immediately retracted by the U.S. military.
Haut was told to promote the idea that the debris was nothing more than a
high-altitude weather balloon. The explanation caused criticism by the
national media and spawned the Roswell UFO conspiracy theory.
In regards to the initial press release, Haut said: “When that hit
the news wires, the world came to an end, as far as I was concerned. My
phone rang and rang and rang.” For the remainder of his career, Haut
worked for the U.S. government. He claimed to know nothing about the
wreckage and that he had simply provided a mistaken press release.
However, in the early 1990s, after he retired, Haut changed the story.
In 1997, he said: “I think it was an extremely well-planned cover-up.”
For the last 15 years of his life, Haut proclaimed that he had witnessed
an alien craft and bodies in Roswell.
In 2002, Haut signed an affidavit that described his experience with
aliens, including details about the UFOs and extraterrestrial bodies. He
claimed to have witnessed an egg-shaped craft and several dead aliens
with elongated heads. In 2007, after the death of Haut, the information
was
published in the book
Witness to Roswell: Unmasking the 60 Year Cover-Up.
It has been suggested that Haut remained silent about the true events
in Roswell out of respect for his friend Colonel William Blanchard. The
reliability of the affidavit remains questionable.
3 Alexander Solonik
In 1960, Alexander Solonik was born in Kurgan, Russia. In the late
1980s, he was arrested for rape and sent to prison. In jail, he became
targeted for death due to his association with the police. However,
Solonik fought off multiple attacks and earned the respect of his fellow
inmates. After escaping from prison in April 1990, Solonik became one
of the most infamous Russian assassins in history. He
murdered a large number of organized crime figures and gained the nicknames “Alexander the Great” and “Superkiller.”
The exact number of people Solonik murdered is a mystery, along with
much of the details surrounding his life. In the early 1990s, he gained a
reputation for being a lethal contract killer who had the ability to
shoot ambidextrously. Solonik confessed to killing a large number of
criminals, including Viktor Nikiforov, Valery Dlugach, Vladislav Vinner,
and Andrey Rura. In 1994, he was arrested at Moscow’s Petrovsky
marketplace. He was taken to Detention Center 1 in Moscow, but
eventually escaped.
Solonik fled to Greece and set up a criminal organization in the
area. He purchased a large amount of real estate in Athens and was
placed on Russia’s Top 10 Most Wanted list. In 1997, a Greek newspaper
reported that a Russian mafia boss had been found dead 15 miles from
Athens. The man had been strangled to death and it was concluded that
the corpse was Alexander Solonik, despite the fact that his fingerprints
in the Interpol database were not accurate. The Greek authorities
insisted that the body was not Solonik. However, he was officially
declared dead. He’s never been heard from since, and the true influence
of Solonik’s criminal network during the mid-1990s remains unknown.
2 Sidney Gottlieb
In 1918, Sidney Gottlieb was born in New York under the name of Joseph
Scheider. He received a PhD in chemistry from Caltech and became an
expert on lethal poisons. In 1951, Gottlieb joined the CIA and was given
a job on the top secret biological warfare program
MKULTRA.
Project MKULTRA was a now-infamous series of experiments used to study
human mind control and modification. During the project, Gottlieb
organized experiments in which humans were used as guinea pigs. For this
reason, he was given the nicknames “Black Sorcerer” and “Dirty
Trickster.”
Gottlieb helped organize Operation Midnight Climax, which was a
program where the CIA purchased houses in San Francisco, Marin, and New
York in order to watch people. For the project, the CIA hired a
large group of prostitutes
that lured subjects back to a house, drugged them, and then had sex
while Gottlieb and others observed from behind two-way mirrors. The
experiments gave results in sexual blackmail, surveillance, and
mind-altering drugs. Gottlieb was also involved with the Cuban Project,
in which he developed ideas to poison Fidel Castro.
During his career, Gottlieb worked for Lockheed, DARPA, the
Department of Defense, and the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence. In one
incident, he attempted to contaminate Iraq’s General Abdul Karim
Qassim’s handkerchief with botulinum. He was also involved with the
Phoenix Program, in which the U.S. performed mind control experiments on
the Vietcong during the Vietnam War. In 1960, he played a role in
America’s attempt to kill the Prime Minister of the Congo,
Patrice Lumumba.
On November 28, 1953, biological warfare specialist Frank Olson died
under mysterious circumstances while working under Sidney Gottlieb.
1 Sergei Tretyakov
Sergei Tretyakov was a Russian spy who defected to the United States in
October 2000. During his time in Russia, Tretyakov was a colonel in the
Russian intelligence service (S.V.R.) and oversaw
covert operations
in New York City and at the United Nations. Starting in 1997, Tretyakov
became a double agent and passed secrets to the Americans. After moving
to the United States, he was given a package worth $2 million and
placed in the Witness Protection Program. In 2008, Tretyakov provided
information about the SVR. He said that the Russian intelligence program
is
just as active today as ever. Tretyakov warned that the world should “wake up” to the danger.
He told NPR that his “defection was a major failure of the Russian
intelligence.” Some of his revelations include the suggestion that Eldar
Kouliev was an SVR spy. He said that U.S. Deputy Secretary of State,
Strobe Talbott, was
influenced by Russia,
along with Canadian Alex Kindy. According to Tretyakov, the KGB
fabricated the nuclear winter story to stop the development of the
Pershing missiles in Europe. He said that the SVR developed a list of
influential political figures that were assassinated in order to bring
Vladimir Putin to power. He also recounted a conversation in which a man
(Vladimir K. Dmitriev) discussed privately owned nuclear weapons.
Sergei Tretyakov also exposed the Russian warfare program known as
Active Measures. The program uses misinformation, propaganda, hoaxes,
and political persecution to influence world events. Active Measures
has been called the “heart and soul of Soviet intelligence,” and is
being used to discredit the United States. Some have speculated that
Russia
orchestrated
the Edward Snowden media leak in order to create anger in the United
States and Europe, specifically Germany. On June 13, 2010, Sergei
Tretyakov died at his house in the United States. The medical examiner
reported that he suffocated after choking on a piece of meat. However,
rumors persist that he was assassinated by the SVR.
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