What do you think about this?
High in the mountains above Bogotá, Colombia, sits a near perfect circular lake called Guatavita. To the Muisca people who lived there, it was not a place to swim or fish. It was a sanctuary. When a new ruler rose to power, he was stripped bare, covered head to toe in gold dust, and floated to the center of the lake on a raft piled with emeralds and golden offerings. There, before his people, he washed the gold from his body into the water and threw the treasures in after it, a gift to the gods below.
The Spanish heard these stories, and a single phrase set the New World on fire, El Dorado, the gilded man. Over the centuries it warped from a man into a lost city of gold, and men died by the thousands chasing it through the jungle.
But the lake was real, and so were the offerings. As early as the 1580s a Spanish merchant cut a notch into the rim and lowered the water enough to pull gold from the mud. In 1898 a British company drained it almost completely, only to watch the mud bake hard as concrete in the sun before they could dig.
Could it be that the real El Dorado was never a city at all, but the bottom of this one quiet lake, still holding what the Muisca gave away?
A drained and emptied legend, or a hoard still waiting under the silt? What do you think is at the bottom of Lake Guatavita?
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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