At 7pm on the evening of November 30,1948, John Lyon and his wife were walking along Somerton Beach, just south of Adelaide, South Australia, Australia. They noticed a well dressed man lying on the beach with his head propped up against the sea wall. The man was lying with his legs outstretched and his feet crossed. As the couple passed, they saw him raise his right arm and then it fell to the sand. John said it looked like a "drunken attempt to smoke a cigarette". A half hour later they were walking back the same way and noticed the same man was still there. There he was in his nice suit and polished shoes, an odd way to dress for lounging on the beach. He was still with his left arm laid out on the beach. The couple figured he was asleep, maybe passed out drunk. There were mosquitos buzzing all around his face. John commented to his wife "he must be dead to the world".

 

       The next morning John Lyons would discover how right he was. As he was returning from a morning swim, John noticed a cluster of people gathered around the area where he had seen the drunk man the day before. As he approached the group he saw a man slumped over in much the same position as the man from yesterday. The body was lying there, legs out, feet crossed, cigarette half smoked lying on his collar, but this man was not drunk, he was dead. This was the man John and his wife saw the day before, this was the Somerton Man! 

 

This case endures to this day as one of the greatest mysteries of Australia. No one is sure who the man is, why he ended up dead on the beach, or even how he died. Dr. John Barkley Bennett put the time of death at no earlier than 2 a.m., noted the likely cause of death as heart failure, and added that he suspected poisoning. The contents of the man’s pockets were spread out on a table: tickets from Adelaide to the beach, a pack of chewing gum, some matches, two combs and a pack of Army Club cigarettes containing seven cigarettes of another, more expensive brand called Kensitas. There was no wallet and no cash, and no ID. None of the man’s clothes had any name tags—indeed, in all but one case the maker’s label had been carefully snipped away. One trouser pocket had been neatly repaired with an unusual variety of orange thread. A day later a full autopsy was carried out and revealed some more strange things. It revealed that the corpse’s pupils were “smaller” than normal and “unusual,” that a dribble of saliva had run down the side of the man’s mouth as he lay, and that “he was probably unable to swallow it.” His spleen, meanwhile, “was strikingly large and firm, about three times normal size,” and the liver was distended with congested blood. In his stomach they found his last meal and more blood. He had eaten a pasty, a folded pastry with a savoury filling, typically of seasoned meat and vegetables. The blood in the stomach also suggested poisoning but there was no evidence that the food was the cause of any poisoning. The poisoning theory seemed to concur with the strange behavior the man exhibited on the beach, instead of drunken behavior it could have been the behavior of a man who had been suffering the effects of poisoning. Now, while this theory made sense given the evidence, repeated tests on both his blood and organs by an expert chemist failed to reveal the faintest trace of a poison. “I was astounded that he found nothing,” Dwyer admitted at the inquest. In fact, no cause of death was found. Among all this weirdness, other odd things were noticed. The dead man’s calf muscles were high and very well developed; although in his late 40s, he had the legs of an athlete. His toes, meanwhile, were oddly wedge-shaped. Testimony given by one experts went as follows: 

 

      I have not seen the tendency of calf muscle so pronounced as in this case…. His feet were rather striking, suggesting—this is my own assumption—that he had been in the habit of wearing high-heeled and pointed shoes.

 

Another expert had sugge

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