What do you think about this?
In the summer of 1579, the English privateer Francis Drake, halfway through sailing around the world, needed to stop and repair his ship, the Golden Hind. He put in somewhere along the coast of northern California, careened his vessel on a beach, spent five weeks among the native Coast Miwok people, and claimed the whole land for England, naming it Nova Albion. Then he sailed on, and the exact spot was lost to history.
For more than four centuries, Californians have argued about where that landing was. The leading candidate is a quiet cove at Point Reyes, just north of San Francisco, now called Drakes Bay, where the pale cliffs match Drake’s own description of a coast that reminded him of England. It would make this stretch of the Bay Area the site of the first English claim on the west coast of the future United States.
The story took a strange turn in 1936, when a brass plate turned up near San Francisco Bay, supposedly the very marker Drake left behind. For decades it was celebrated as real. Then, in 1977, scientific testing proved it a modern hoax, and the mystery of the true landing site opened right back up.
Makes you wonder how a moment this important, the first English footfall on the California coast, could leave so little behind that we still cannot say for certain which beach it happened on.
A forgotten cove at Point Reyes, or somewhere along the coast we have never guessed? What do you think became of the true site of Drake’s landing?
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 The study was retracted in 2024.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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