What do you think about this?
High in the mountains above Bogotá, Colombia, sits a near perfect circular lake called Guatavita. To the Muisca people who lived there, it was not a place to swim or fish. It was a sanctuary. When a new ruler rose to power, he was stripped bare, covered head to toe in gold dust, and floated to the center of the lake on a raft piled with emeralds and golden offerings. There, before his people, he washed the gold from his body into the water and threw the treasures in after it, a gift to the gods below.
The Spanish heard these stories, and a single phrase set the New World on fire, El Dorado, the gilded man. Over the centuries it warped from a man into a lost city of gold, and men died by the thousands chasing it through the jungle.
But the lake was real, and so were the offerings. As early as the 1580s a Spanish merchant cut a notch into the rim and lowered the water enough to pull gold from the mud. In 1898 a British company drained it almost completely, only to watch the mud bake hard as concrete in the sun before they could dig.
Could it be that the real El Dorado was never a city at all, but the bottom of this one quiet lake, still holding what the Muisca gave away?
A drained and emptied legend, or a hoard still waiting under the silt? What do you think is at the bottom of Lake Guatavita?
What do you think about this? On January 20, 1996, three young women in Varginha, Brazil, saw a four foot creature with oily skin and red eyes crouched by a wall. The army was in town that morning. A policeman said to have handled it died a month later. Cover story, or Brazil’s Roswell?
What do you think about this? In 1800 settlers at Conneaut, Ohio, opened a four acre burial ground in rows and reported skeletons over seven feet, jaws that fit over a man’s face, double rows of teeth. The graves were plowed under within a generation. Tall tale, or a people buried twice?
What do you think about this? The Iron Pillar of Delhi is six tons of forged iron from around 400 AD. It has stood outside through 1,600 years of monsoons and never rusted, thanks to a protective film from phosphorus rich iron nobody made again. Lucky recipe, or knowledge lost on purpose?
What do you think about this? North Sea trawlers pull up mammoth teeth, flint tools and a carved harpoon from 120 feet deep. Until 8,000 years ago that seabed was Doggerland, a forested land the size of Britain, drowned by rising seas and a tsunami. The lost land of every old story?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a Florida family found a polished 22 pound steel ball in burned brush. It hummed when a guitar played, rolled across rooms on its own and changed direction. Navy X rays showed objects inside, origin unknown. Valve ball, or something that landed?
What do you think about this? The Whaley House in San Diego was built in 1857 where a man was slowly hanged five years earlier. A baby and a daughter later died inside. Visitors report footsteps in empty rooms and a pressure on the throat where the gallows stood. Old house, or long memory?
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