One Minute and Forty-Three Seconds

A Mystery Within A Mystery: Who and Where is Joanna Lopez?

April 30, 2022 Episode 25
One Minute and Forty-Three Seconds
A Mystery Within A Mystery: Who and Where is Joanna Lopez?
Show Notes

On January 14, 1989, NBC affiliate TV station WMAQ in Chicago was broadcasting their regular sign-off for the evening. This included a number of Public Services announcements, followed by the nightly playing of the National Anthem. After the station signed off for the early moring hours, a missing child poster was displayed. But there was something incredibly unnerving about this particular broadcast. 

The first was the lack of information. An extremely poor quality photo (you can barely make out the person's face, it's that bad) was displayed along with the text "Missing-Joanna Lopez" alongside a Chicago phone number. No other information accompanied the image. 

Two years later on the same station, the same obscure posted appeared again after the station signed off--this time the image remained for 10 seconds before switching to the familiar colored bars that anyone familiar with TV in the early 1990's likely remembers seeing.

All this would lead you to the conclusion that Joanna Lopez, whoever she was, was still missing in 1991. But there was just one problem--there is no record of anyone by the name Joanna Lopez going missing in the late 1980's in Chicago.

Armchair detectives have spent hours combing the Internet for any record, any article, any evidence that a person by the name of Joanna Lopez ever existed and was missing in 1989.

Today's episode features returning guest Joann Li and together we discuss all the questions around this bizarre and incredibly obscure situation. 

NOTE: This episode discusses a television broadcast and an image-which unfortunately cannot be displayed in a podcast format. For this reason, we encourage you to visit http://143mysteries.com or our Instagram page here: https://www.instagram.com/143mysteries/

Images associated with this case and our discussion will be posted on both platforms.