CONFIDENTIAL

The Mystery Files

Stories too strange
to leave alone.

Disappearances with no answer. Hauntings with paperwork behind them. Lights in the sky reported by people with careers to lose. Cases that ought to be solvable now and somehow still aren't.

Pull up a chair. The next file is already open on my desk.

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The Series

Two volumes to start.
More on the desk.

Gone Without a Trace: They Vanished and Were Never Found, by Audrey Valez
BOOK ONE

Gone Without a Trace

Twenty people who stepped out of an ordinary day and were never seen again. In a world of cameras and card swipes, that should be impossible. It keeps happening anyway.

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Double Lives: True Stories of the Strangers Among Us, by Audrey Valez
BOOK TWO

Double Lives

Nobody warns you about the people you already know. Twenty cases of second families, invented credentials and borrowed names, kept running for years.

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From the desk

Case files, free to read

A few of the ones I keep circling back to at two in the morning.

FILE 004

Ten by Eighteen

SUBJECT: John Edward Jones, age 26
LOCATION: Nutty Putty Cave, Utah County, Utah
STATUS: NOT RECOVERED. CAVE SEALED

There's a cave in Utah filled with concrete, and a plaque on the hillside above it. We know exactly where he is, down to the inch.

Open the file →
FILE 005

Cut From the Inside

SUBJECT: Nine hikers, Ural Polytechnic Institute
LOCATION: Kholat Syakhl, northern Ural Mountains, USSR
STATUS: OFFICIALLY CLOSED. STILL DISPUTED

I didn't want this one solved. Then Russia reopened it, and two Swiss physicists published a model that mostly works.

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FILE 006

Four Hundred Miles

SUBJECT: JAL Cargo Flight 1628, Boeing 747-200F
LOCATION: Eastern Alaska, inbound to Anchorage
STATUS: EXPLAINED. DISPUTED

Everyone argues about whether he saw a spacecraft. The harder question is what you do when a reliable man tells you something you can't believe.

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Audrey Valez at her desk

Who's writing this?

What keeps me reading is the not-knowing. We have DNA now, and there's a camera over every door. These cases should all be solvable. Some of them just aren't.

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