Mysteries & Enigmas Quiz – Printable Version
20 multiple-choice questions with an explained answer key, ready to print.
Print the sheet (or save it as a PDF from the print window), hand it out, then mark it together using the answer page: every answer is explained. Perfect for a party, a birthday, a classroom, a care home or a team activity.
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- In 1947, in Roswell (New Mexico), debris led people to believe a flying saucer had crashed. According to the 1994 US Air Force report, what was it?
- A. A downed spy plane
- B. A metallic meteorite
- C. A farmers' prank
- D. A secret balloon designed to detect Soviet nuclear tests
- The 'curse of Tutankhamun' supposedly struck those who opened his tomb in 1922. How long did Howard Carter, the archaeologist who discovered it, live?
- A. He died a few weeks later
- B. Until 1939, 17 years later
- C. Until 1924
- D. He died inside the tomb
- How did the people of Easter Island move their giant statues, the moai, according to an experiment carried out in 2012?
- A. By rolling them on logs
- B. By floating them along the coast
- C. By pulling them with horses
- D. By making them 'walk' upright, rocked from side to side with ropes
- Found in 1901 in a Greek shipwreck, the more than 2,000-year-old 'Antikythera mechanism' was used to…
- A. Measure the depth of the sea
- B. Encrypt military messages
- C. Predict the positions of celestial bodies and eclipses
- D. Count coins
- In 1971, a hijacker known as 'D. B. Cooper' obtained a ransom and then vanished forever. How?
- A. By hiding in the baggage hold
- B. By escaping by car at the airport
- C. By parachuting out of the plane with the money
- D. By posing as a pilot
- Under which king was the mysterious 'Man in the Iron Mask' imprisoned, until his death in the Bastille in 1703?
- A. Louis XIV
- B. Henri IV
- C. Louis XIII
- D. Louis XV
- By 1590, the English settlers of Roanoke (North America) had all vanished. What clue was found carved on a post?
- A. A drawing of a ship
- B. A cross and a date
- C. The word 'CROATOAN'
- D. Nothing at all
- In 2013, the CIA acknowledged that many 'UFOs' reported in the 1950s-1960s near Area 51 (Nevada) were actually…
- A. Weather balloons
- B. Sunlight reflecting off the desert
- C. Its top-secret spy planes flying very high, such as the U-2
- D. Soviet satellites
- In 1991, two Englishmen, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, revealed the origin of the mysterious 'crop circles' appearing in wheat fields since 1976. What was it?
- A. Miniature tornadoes
- B. Themselves, with a plank, a rope and a cap
- C. Hedgehogs
- D. Military drones
- Which script of ancient Crete, used by the Minoans, has still not been deciphered, although its 'cousin' was decoded in 1952?
- A. Hieroglyphs
- B. Cuneiform
- C. The Phoenician alphabet
- D. Linear A
- Why do Nostradamus's prophecies (1555) so often seem to 'come true'?
- A. Because he travelled through time
- B. Because his quatrains are so vague that people match them to events after the fact
- C. Because he was a secret adviser to kings
- D. Because they are rewritten every year
- Which French scholar solved the mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822, thanks to the Rosetta Stone?
- A. Howard Carter
- B. Gaspard Monge
- C. Auguste Mariette
- D. Jean-François Champollion
- According to carbon-14 dating carried out in 1988, when does the Shroud of Turin date from?
- A. The 1st century
- B. Pharaonic Egypt
- C. The 18th century
- D. The Middle Ages (between 1260 and 1390)
- Which King of France had the Knights Templar arrested on Friday 13 October 1307, giving rise to the legend of their hidden treasure?
- A. Saint Louis
- B. Louis XI
- C. Philip the Fair
- D. Philip Augustus
- What are the thousands of bare circles in the grass, a few metres across, that dot the grasslands of the Namib Desert called?
- A. Fairy circles
- B. Crop circles
- C. Desert eyes
- D. Gaia's rings
- What does the "Fermi paradox" sum up?
- A. The harder you look for something, the less you find it
- B. If alien civilisations are common, why do we see no trace of them?
- C. A planet cannot have two moons
- D. Time passes faster at altitude
- What is a prehistoric monument made of standing stones arranged in a circle, like Stonehenge, called?
- A. A dolmen
- B. A cromlech
- C. A tumulus
- D. A cairn
- What is the line of large submerged stone blocks off the Bahamas, which some present as a road to Atlantis, called?
- A. The Giant's Causeway
- B. Adam's Bridge
- C. The Bimini Road
- D. The Yonaguni wall
- Who wrote "The Mystery of the Yellow Room" (1907), a "locked-room" puzzle solved by young reporter Rouletabille?
- A. Maurice Leblanc
- B. Gaston Leroux
- C. Georges Simenon
- D. Agatha Christie
- In 1908, an explosion flattened about 80 million trees in Siberia, near Tunguska. What is the most likely cause?
- A. A secret military test
- B. An asteroid or comet exploding in the atmosphere
- C. A volcanic eruption
- D. An earthquake
Answer key — Mysteries & Enigmas Quiz
- D. A secret balloon designed to detect Soviet nuclear tests'Project Mogul' sent strings of balloons carrying microphones high into the sky to listen for Soviet atomic explosions.
- B. Until 1939, 17 years laterThe legend was born from the death of Lord Carnarvon, the sponsor, in 1923, from an infection after a mosquito bite.
- D. By making them 'walk' upright, rocked from side to side with ropesWith a replica weighing over 4 tonnes, a team of 18 people managed to move the statue forward by rocking it, the way you shift a fridge.
- C. Predict the positions of celestial bodies and eclipsesWith its dozens of bronze gears, it is often called the 'first analogue computer'.
- C. By parachuting out of the plane with the moneyHe jumped at night, in the rain, with 200,000 dollars, over the forests of Washington State.
- A. Louis XIVA delightful detail: his mask was actually… made of black velvet!
- C. The word 'CROATOAN'It was the name of a nearby island and of a friendly Native people.
- C. Its top-secret spy planes flying very high, such as the U-2The U-2 flew above 18,000 metres, an altitude then thought impossible.
- B. Themselves, with a plank, a rope and a capThe cap had a wire sight to walk straight lines in the dark.
- D. Linear ALinear B, the later script, was deciphered by architect Michael Ventris: it was ancient Greek.
- B. Because his quatrains are so vague that people match them to events after the factWith no precise dates or names, his verses can fit almost any disaster…
- D. Jean-François ChampollionThe stone bore the same text in Greek, Demotic and hieroglyphs.
- D. The Middle Ages (between 1260 and 1390)Three independent laboratories reached the same conclusion. That did not end the mystery: we still don't know how the image was produced on the cloth.
- C. Philip the FairIn debt to the order, the king accused it of heresy. The Templars' treasure has never been found…
- A. Fairy circlesTermites eating the roots? Plants organising themselves to capture scarce water?
- B. If alien civilisations are common, why do we see no trace of them?According to tradition, physicist Enrico Fermi asked over lunch in 1950: "But where is everybody?"
- B. A cromlechThe word comes from Breton/Welsh for "curved" and "flat stone".
- C. The Bimini RoadDiscovered in 1968, this "road" is, for most geologists, a natural formation of fractured beachrock.
- B. Gaston LerouxHow could the attacker escape from a room locked from the inside?
- B. An asteroid or comet exploding in the atmosphereThe object probably exploded several kilometres up, leaving no crater, hence decades of more or less far-fetched theories.