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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37806
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The disappearances you gave as examples where very likely not unexplainable from the perspective of the disappeared people. They just seem inexplicable a few hundred years after the fact.

Similarly "unexplainable" things happen today all the time. Think of [Malaysia Airlines Flight 370](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370). It is highly likely that the airplane wasn't taken up by an alien spacecraft or lost in the Bermuda triangle, but simply lost its way due to some technical malfunction of human error and now lies somewhere in the ocean where the searchers just haven't yet looked. Or all the people who turn up at police stations without identity, and no one knows who they are and where they came from. No, they aren't [mermaids](https://www.wowktv.com/archives/woman-found-wet-mostly-naked-%E2%80%93-says-she-is-a-mermaid/839055133) or returned from alien abductions, they just suffer from memory loss, psychosis, or outright lie.

So if something happens and someone cannot explain how it could have happend, there is always someone who knows how it happened who doesn't tell – either because he doesn't want to or because he can't (or because no one thinks to ask him or because they don't believe what he says).

It's like this: If you come home one day and find your window broken and a baseball lying on your living room floor, and the kids outside say that they don't know how it happened and they haven't seen anything, then you have an unexplained event.

So if you want a colony to disappear from a planet, simply have them disappear. It's perfectly fine if **_your narrator doesn't know_** the truth and believes the legends.

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### Re: your comment

**It seems to me that you have plotted yourself into a corner.**

You want a world that is so advanced that all facts are known. That makes any mystery impossible – unless you want to introduce the supernatural.

If you want non-supernatural unresolved mysteries, then you'll have to introduce imperfection. Either your technology is not ubiquitous or it fails or _people intentionally subvert it_.

Original score: 14