What do you think about this?
On a tiny, treeless island in the vast South Pacific, one of the most remote inhabited places on Earth, nearly a thousand giant stone faces stand watch. They are the moai of Rapa Nui, what most of us call Easter Island. Carved from the soft volcanic rock of a single quarry, the largest of them stand over thirty feet tall and weigh as much as eighty tons.
The people who carved them, the Rapa Nui, were master sculptors and navigators who reached this speck of land across thousands of miles of open ocean. And that is where the questions begin. How did they move these colossal statues, some for miles, from the quarry to platforms all around the coast, without wheels, without draft animals, without cranes? Their own tradition says the moai walked. In recent years researchers have shown that a statue can in fact be rocked forward, upright, by teams pulling ropes side to side, so that it appears to walk across the land.
And still there are mysteries. A script called Rongorongo, carved on wooden tablets, has never been deciphered. And the great debate over what happened to their forests and their society goes on.
The truth may be far stranger than we have been told, not because someone else built these statues, but because the Rapa Nui did the very thing we spent centuries insisting was impossible.
A lost people who out did our assumptions, or a mystery still only half explained? What do you think really moved the moai?
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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