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On the night of May 10, 1941, a Scottish farmer named David McLean found a German Messerschmitt airplane ablaze in his field and a parachutist who identified himself as Captain Alfred Horn. McLean's mum was soon serving him a cup of tea by the cottage fireside, but their surprise guest was no ordinary Luftwaffe pilot. Incredibly, he was Rudolf Hess, a longtime Hitler loyalist, to say the least. Hess joined the Nazi party in 1920, stood with his friend Adolf Hitler at the Beer Hall Putsch, and served in Landsberg prison -- where he took dictation for much of Mein Kampf. As deputy Fuhrer, Hess was positioned behind only Hermann Goering in the succession hierarchy of the Nazi regime that had Europe firmly under the heel of its jackboot.

Hess's appearance on Scottish soil, a self-described mission of peace just weeks before Hitler would launch his ill-fated invasion of the Soviet Union, was one of the war's strangest incidents. The search for explanations began on the morning after and has roiled on now for 75 years, spawning theories both intriguing (World War II might have ended differently) and bizarre (the man wasn't Hess at all but a body double.) The truth is likely as interesting as any of the fantasies—but it's still not entirely certain what happened 75 years ago.

The Hess flight was remarkable in itself. He left an airfield near Munich in a small Messerschmitt fighter-bomber a little before 6 p.m., flying up the Rhine and across the North Sea. Hess displayed considerable skill by navigating such a course alone, using only charts and maps, on a foggy dark night over largely unfamiliar terrain—all while avoiding being shot down by British air defenses. By 10:30, Hess was over Scotland, out of fuel, and forced to bail out just 12 miles from his destination.

That unlikely site was Dungavel House, home of the Duke of Hamilton. Hess hoped to make contact with one of the highly placed British figures who, unlike Churchill, were willing to make peace with the Nazis on Hitler's terms. Hess believed that Hamilton headed a faction of such people and immediately asked his captors to be taken to him. But Hess was misinformed. Hamilton, who wasn't home that night but on duty commanding an RAF air base, was committed to his country and to its fight against Germany.

The unlikely envoy's mission quickly took a turn for the worse. When granted a meeting with Hamilton the next day Hess's pleas fell on deaf ears. Worse for Hess, he denied from the start that Hitler knew anything of his mission, which meant that the British afforded him none of the diplomatic respect to which he thought he'd be entitled. Instead he was imprisoned, and by the night of June 16, the obvious failure of his mission left Hess so mentally shattered that he attempted suicide by hurling himself down a flight of stairs.

Hess spent the war in British hands, confined in various locales including (briefly) the Tower of London and a military hospital at which he was even allowed guarded drives in the country. He was visited frequently by intelligence officers eager for secrets and by psychiatrists eager to plumb the Nazi mind—which in Hess's case increasingly showed serious signs of mental illness. The psychiatric examinations were rooted less in concern for Hess's mental health than in the hope that this fanatically devoted Nazi could provide them valuable insights about how the criminals ruling Germany, including Hitler himself, thought.

Hess was transferred back to Nuremberg for the post-war trials in October, 1945, where he escaped the hangman but was sentenced to life in prison. He spent the rest of his long life, 46 years, as Prisoner Number 7 in Spandau where he lingered long after the other Nazis were freed. Hess was the facility's only prisoner for more than 20 years, his term ending only when the 93-year-old was found hanging from a lamp cord in a garden building in August 1987. The suicide was denounced as a murder by those, including Hess's own son, who suspected he'd been silenced.

But Hess's death didn't end the questions. Had he really come alone? Had someone sent him to Scotland or had someone sent for him?

News of Hess's flight was a bombshell in Berlin, and Nazi authorities quickly moved to disassociate him from the regime. The German public was quickly told that Hess suffered from mental disturbance and hallucinations.

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