What do you think about this?
Off the coast of Pohnpei, a small island in the western Pacific, lies a ruined city that should not be possible. It is called Nan Madol, and it is built out over the water, more than a hundred artificial islets laced together by canals, which is why some call it the Venice of the Pacific. But it is what the islets are made of that stops people cold.
The whole city is constructed from massive columns of black basalt, long rod like stones that formed naturally in a volcano, some of them weighing several tons. They are stacked like giant logs to build walls over twenty feet high. In total, the site holds close to a million tons of stone. It was the capital of the Saudeleur dynasty, built up over centuries beginning around eight or nine hundred years ago.
Here is the puzzle. There are no quarries at the building site. The basalt came from elsewhere on the island, and somehow those enormous columns were moved across land and water and lifted into place, by a people with no metal tools, no pulleys, and no written record of how they did it. Local legend simply says two sorcerers made the stones fly through the air.
Makes you wonder how a society we tend to picture as small and simple moved a mountain of stone into the sea and built a city on it.
Lost engineering we have underestimated, or a mystery the islanders themselves could only explain with magic? What do you think raised Nan Madol?
What do you think about this? Scans of Gunung Padang in Indonesia show hidden chambers deep inside the hill, and one team dated its oldest layers to 25,000 years ago. The study was retracted in 2024. The chambers have never been opened. Natural hill, or the oldest pyramid on Earth?
What do you think about this? Edgar Cayce gave over 14,000 trance readings, all written down and still on file. He said proof of Atlantis would rise near Bimini in 1968. That year divers found a half mile road of giant stone blocks there. True seer, or lucky guess?
What do you think about this? Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Kentucky built a 500 foot tunnel just to move its dead out of sight of the living. It closed in 1961. Visitors still report a boy rolling a ball across empty floors. Restless spirits, or a dark building playing tricks on the mind?
What do you think about this? In 1891, a poor French priest named Bérenger Saunière began tearing up his church floor, then spent the next two decades funding lavish buildings on a stipend that should not have covered it. Real treasure, or a secret about how he ran his church?
What do you think about this? Puma Punku’s H-shaped stone blocks, cut from andesite by a culture dating to roughly 600 CE, are flat to within a couple millimeters, with no known metal tools hard enough to do it. Lost technique, or something we haven’t caught up to yet?
What do you think about this? The Georgia Guidestones were commissioned anonymously in 1979 by a man calling himself R.C. Christian, and no one ever learned his real name before the monument was bombed on July 6, 2022. Message, or a monument that did not deserve to stand?
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