What do you think about this?
In September 1857, the SS Central America, a side wheel steamer packed with California gold rush fortune, sailed straight into a hurricane off the Carolina coast. Five hundred and seventy eight people were aboard. Only one hundred and fifty three came home. The rest went down with the ship, and with them, tons of gold. She carried around eleven tons of it in her hold, not counting whatever passengers had sewn into their coats. The loss was so enormous it helped trigger a national financial panic.
For one hundred and thirty one years she sat more than a mile and a half down in the dark, untouched. Then in 1988 an engineer named Tommy Thompson found her with a homemade underwater robot and began bringing up gold bars and coins by the ton, some worth a small fortune each.
Here is where it turns strange. Thompson sold the treasure, then vanished, with investors and crew saying they were never paid. He was eventually caught and jailed for refusing to reveal where five hundred missing gold coins had gone.
What if there is still a fortune unaccounted for, on the sea floor or hidden somewhere on land?
A cursed ship, the find of a lifetime, or a treasure that was never fully recovered? What do you think really happened to the gold of the Central America?
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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