What do you think about this?
In 1820, a man named Thomas Beale walked into a tavern in Lynchburg, Virginia and asked the innkeeper to hold onto an iron strongbox for him. He said he would be back in ten years. If he did not return, the innkeeper was to open it.
Beale never came back.
When the box was finally opened decades later, inside were three coded letters and instructions. The first cipher described the location of a treasure hidden in Bedford County, Virginia. Roughly 3,000 pounds of gold, 5,000 pounds of silver, and a fortune in jewels Beale had traded for on his way back from the western territories. Modern estimates put the value north of $63 million.
The second cipher, the only one ever solved, used the Declaration of Independence as its key. It described the treasure itself in detail.
The first and third ciphers, the ones that name the burial spot and the rightful heirs, have never been cracked. Not by amateur codebreakers. Not by professional cryptographers. Not by the NSA.
Treasure hunters have torn through Bedford County for 200 years and come up empty. Some have died trying.
Some think Beale used a one-time pad lost to time. Some think the whole thing is an elaborate 19th-century hoax meant to sell pamphlets. Some think the answer is sitting right in front of us, written into a document the entire country already owns.
Could it be the answer was never meant to be found?
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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