Unsolved Mysteries was huge when I was a kid. Every week, and more often once it went into syndication, it would walk viewers through a handful of absolutely bonkers stories. People who’d disappeared in the middle of the day for no apparent reason. UFO sightings. Even Bigfoot! Robert Stack would host and narrate, interview subjects would explain what happened, and actors — often the actual people who’d lived the events — would reenact any key situations for which there wasn’t video. Back in my day, believe it or not, many important happenings were not captured via cell-phone cameras.
Most TV shows, even the unsettling ones, give you some sort of release at the end. Not Unsolved Mysteries; that was the whole point. These were whodunnits with confounding fact patterns, and the facts had to fit together somehow, since they were true, but you never found out how — because no one knew, at least no one willing to come forward. The show would just paint a picture horrifying enough to keep you up at night, and then walk away.
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