What do you think about this?
If you stand on the cliffs at the western edge of San Francisco, just past the Cliff House, you can look down at the concrete bones of what was once the largest indoor swimming complex on Earth.
Adolph Sutro, the millionaire engineer who became the city’s mayor, opened the Sutro Baths in 1896. Three acres of glass and steel, seven saltwater pools heated to different temperatures, slides, trapezes, a museum of curiosities, an amphitheater seating thousands. At high tide, the Pacific itself rushed in through a tunnel and filled the pools in an hour. At low tide, the pumps did the work.
For seventy years it was the place where San Francisco came to swim, court, gawk, and gather. Then on a June night in 1966, while the building was already mid demolition, it caught fire. Within hours the whole structure was gone. Witnesses said the smoke rolled blue and green and orange as the chemicals and the redwood beams gave themselves up to the ocean wind.
The fire was never solved. The owners collected the insurance. The ruins were left exactly where they fell.
Visit today, and you can walk down the path and stand inside the foundation. Old concrete tanks still hold seawater. A tunnel runs out under the cliff and opens onto the Pacific. People say they have heard voices from the rocks at dusk. Photographers who shoot inside the cave system describe orbs, footsteps, the unmistakable feeling of being watched by something that does not want to leave.
What if the joy and pain of a hundred years of human gathering really does soak into the walls, and the place we tore down never actually left?
What do you think about this? Over five months from late 1989, more than 13,000 people in Belgium reported a silent black triangle with three corner lights. In March 1990 two F sixteen jets locked radar on it, and it made moves no pilot could survive. Secret aircraft, or a genuine visitor?
What do you think about this? The Abenaki spoke of something in Lake Champlain long before Europeans arrived, and Port Henry still keeps a sign counting sightings. In 1977 Sandra Mansi photographed a long neck and a dark hump, and no hoax was ever found in it. Log, or a real animal?
What do you think about this? In 1579 Francis Drake beached the Golden Hind somewhere on the northern California coast and claimed the land for England. Nobody can say which beach. A brass plate found in 1936 was celebrated for decades, then proved a hoax. Point Reyes, or somewhere else?
What do you think about this? Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, one is engraved on copper instead of parchment, and it is a treasure map. It lists 64 hiding places holding tons of gold and silver. Not one has ever been found. Real temple gold, or an ancient legend set in metal?
What do you think about this? On August 15, 1977, an Ohio telescope caught a 72 second burst from Sagittarius, 30 times stronger than background, right on the hydrogen frequency. The astronomer circled it and wrote Wow. It never came back. Fluke, or one word of a conversation?
What do you think about this? The Shroud of Turin carries a full length image of a man that behaves like a photographic negative, which nobody noticed until it was first photographed in 1898. Carbon dating said medieval. Nobody can explain how the image formed. Artwork, or something else?
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