Eleven ships heavy with the wealth of an empire sailed out of Havana in July of 1715. They were carrying silver from Mexico, gold from Colombia, emeralds, Chinese porcelain, and by some accounts a set of jewels made for the new Queen of Spain, who had refused to share a bed with the king until her treasure arrived.
Seven days later, in the dark hours of July 31, a hurricane caught the fleet off the coast of Florida and drove it onto the reefs. Every Spanish ship was lost. More than a thousand men died in the surf. Survivors dragged themselves onto a wild beach with nothing but the clothes they wore.
Spain salvaged what it could. Pirates took a share too. Then the wrecks were forgotten for two hundred and fifty years, until a building contractor named Kip Wagner started finding blackened silver coins on the beach after storms. That stretch of Florida is still called the Treasure Coast, and it still pays. In 2015, three hundred years almost to the day, a crew of treasure hunters pulled up 350 gold coins worth about 4.5 million dollars in water only fifteen feet deep.
As a treasure hunter, that is the part that gets me. Fifteen feet of water. A few hundred feet from the sunbathers.
And the Queen’s jewels have never been found.
Could it be that the richest prize of the entire fleet is still lying under the sand, within sight of the beach.
Scattered and gone forever, or still out there waiting for the right storm?
What do you think about this? On May 20, 1967, a prospector in Manitoba walked up to a landed craft near Falcon Lake. It blasted him with hot gas and left a grid of burns on his chest matching its vents. Three governments investigated. Canada put it on a coin. Hoax, or the real thing?
What do you think about this? Serpent Mound in Ohio is a 1,348 foot snake of earth, its head aimed at the summer solstice sunset, its body built on the rim of an ancient meteor crater. One dating puts it right after Halley’s Comet in 1066. Sacred art, or a message for the sky?
What do you think about this? Since the early 1990s about two percent of people in Taos, New Mexico, hear a low hum like a distant diesel that never shuts off. In 1993 Los Alamos and Sandia scientists came to find it. Their instruments found nothing. Trick of the ear, or a hidden signal?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a retired air traffic controller cast footprints in Louisiana’s Honey Island Swamp: three webbed toes, a foot long. He had reported a seven foot gray haired creature with yellow eyes standing over a dead boar in 1963. Hoax, or the Letiche?
What do you think about this? For nearly three years beginning April 2, 1968, a glowing figure of a woman appeared on the roof of a church in Cairo, seen by crowds of tens of thousands, Christians and Muslims together, and caught in press photographs. Mass illusion, or a visitation?
What do you think about this? A 2,200 year old wooden bird dug up at Saqqara in 1898 has no legs, no feathers, straight wings and a tail that stands upright like the fin of an airplane. Some replicas glide. A child’s toy that looks like a plane, or a memory of something that flew?
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