92,000 words. 336 pages. Photographs. Illustrations.ON JANUARY 9 2003 the Australian naval vessel HMAS Stuart came upon a 150-tonne craft, High Aim 6, drifting deserted in the Indian Ocean. The captain's reading glasses lay in the wheelhouse. Toothbrushes hung neatly from a rack. In lockers, clothes lay neatly folded. Wallets, filled with cash and documents, were undisturbed. But the captain and his 10 crewmen had vanished without trace. After fruitlessly combing the vessel for clues, the baffled Australian sailors nicknamed her 'Mary Celeste.' It was a black joke, but apt. Despite massive air-sea searches, the captain and his men were never found. The original Mary Celeste had created international puzzlement in 1872,when she was similarly discovered adrift with nobody aboard. According to contemporary newspapers and official reports, the mystery was of a kind that had never occurred before. That assumption was wrong. As any painstaking researcher can ascertain, Mary Celeste and High Aim 6 are PARTS OF A PATTERN which has repeated itself across the centuries . A pattern in which ships are [for no apparent reason] found stripped of all human life. It's a phenomenon whose meaning defies our understanding.Acclaimed author- journalist John Pinkney has devoted his career to investigating such profound enigmas. In this unique book, he also clinically chronicles a host of similarly baffling cases: *The dead sailor whose face haunts an official Navy photograph. * The widely-published novel that foretold, in deep detail, the doom of Princess Diana -19 years before she died in a Paris car-smash. *Hell from Within. Modern victims of SHC [Spontaneous Human Combustion] - and the uncanny coincidences that link their lives. * Don't Disturb the Dead. Enigma of the Iceman's Curse. *UFO nightmare in a rural garden. The triangular craft that brought illness and death. ...And many more reports of the unknown and unexplained.Other compelling ebooks by John Pinkney: HAUNTED: the Ghosts that share our world...ALIEN AIRSHIPS Over Old America...A PARANORMAL FILE...AUSTRALIA'S STRANGEST MYSTERIES...THIRST An Inheritance of Evil...The Girl Who Touched Infinity...The Key and the Fountain..