Unsolved Mysteries - Format

Format

Unsolved Mysteries featured segments in documentary film style, with actors portraying the victims, perpetrators and witnesses. In most cases, however, victim's family members and police officials were also featured in interview segments interspersed throughout the dramatizations. In the earlier episodes, the following message was related to the audience at the beginning of the program:

"This program is about unsolved mysteries. Whenever possible, the actual family members and police officials have participated in recreating the events. What you are about to see is not a news broadcast."

In the specials that first aired on NBC, the last sentence of the disclaimer said:

"This is not an NBC News Production."

For other special episodes, like Mysteries of the Psychic Mind or Mysteries of the Afterlife, the message was:

"This program is about unsolved mysteries. The re-enactments and special effects are actual eyewitness accounts. What you are about to see is not a news broadcast."

Each episode of Unsolved Mysteries usually featured three or four segments, each involving a different story. The show's host offered voice over narration for each segment, and appeared on-screen to begin and end segments and offer segues.

While the show was in production, viewers were invited to telephone, write letters or, in the newer broadcasts, submit tips through their website] if they have information that might help solve a mystery featured on the show.

Unsolved Mysteries segments, all of which involved actual events, generally fell into one of four categories:

• Criminal cases: Accounts of abductions, suspicious deaths, homicides, robberies, claims of innocence, missing persons and other miscellaneous unsolved cases where the suspects were unknown or could not be located.
• Lost loves: Accounts of individuals trying to reunite with someone from their past; often involving closed adoption, people separated by circumstances, or an unknown "Good Samaritan" that saved someone's life.
• Unexplained/Alternative history: Alternative theories of history (among them the theories that outlaws such as Billy the Kid and Butch Cassidy did not die as history recorded, that the Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov survived the 1918 regicide that killed her entire family, that the assassination of Louisiana senator Huey Long may have been an accident, that the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr was in fact a conspiracy, and that Kurt Cobain may have been murdered).
• Paranormal matters: Accounts of miracles, alleged UFO/alien encounters (including examination of the Roswell UFO Incident and the Phoenix UFO Incident, the UFO incident in Eupen, Belgium observed by NATO fighter jets, or scientific questions about life on Mars), ghosts, Bigfoot, or other inexplicable phenomena.

Viewers were given updates on success stories, where suspects were brought to justice and loved ones reunited.