What do you think about this?
High on a rocky butte in Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, an ancient people left a clock made of stone and sunlight. In 1977, an artist named Anna Sofaer was recording rock art near the summit of Fajada Butte when she noticed something remarkable. Around the middle of the day, a thin blade of light slipped between three large stone slabs leaning against the cliff and fell precisely across a spiral carved into the rock behind them.
She had stumbled onto it at the summer solstice, and the dagger of light cut straight through the center of the spiral. When she returned at other times of year, the pattern changed with astonishing purpose. At the winter solstice, two daggers of light framed the spiral on either side. At the equinoxes, a smaller spiral nearby was marked as well. The slabs and the carvings together tracked the turning of the entire year, and even the longer cycles of the moon.
This was the work of the Ancestral Puebloans, a people with no written language and no metal tools, roughly a thousand years ago. Somehow they understood the sky well enough to build a marker that still keeps time today, in a spot so remote that it took chance and a sharp eye to rediscover it.
Makes you wonder how a culture we often picture as simple mapped the heavens with such precision, and how many other quiet instruments like it are still waiting on cliffsides we never climb.
Lucky accident of falling rock, or a deliberate calendar built by master astronomers? What do you think the Sun Dagger was made to do?
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?
What do you think about this? In December 1900 three lighthouse keepers vanished from a rock off Scotland. Door shut, meal uneaten, clocks stopped, one oilskin still on its hook, so a man walked into a storm without it. No bodies found. Rogue wave, or something stranger on that island?
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