What do you think about this?
In April 1925, a British explorer named Percy Fawcett walked into the Amazon and never walked out. He was one of the most experienced surveyors of his age, a man who had mapped uncharted stretches of Bolivia and Brazil for the Royal Geographical Society. But he was chasing something bigger than a map. He believed a lost city, an advanced ancient civilization he simply called Z, lay hidden in the jungles of the Mato Grosso, and he was certain he could find it.
He set out from the town of Cuiabá with his son Jack and Jack’s friend Raleigh Rimell, traveling light and refusing a large party so they could move fast. His last letter home, sent from a place he called Dead Horse Camp on the twenty ninth of May, said he was about to cross into unexplored country and told his wife not to fear failure. After that, silence. No bodies, no camp, no trace.
Over the years more than a hundred people are believed to have died searching for him. Some found nothing. Some never came back either.
Most researchers now believe the three men died within days of that last letter, from illness, starvation, or a hostile encounter deep in the forest. Yet others point out that for all his eccentricity, Fawcett was rarely wrong about the land, and that ruins of large ancient settlements have since been found in the Amazon.
Is it possible that Fawcett was right about a lost civilization, and only wrong about surviving to prove it?
A doomed obsession, or a man who vanished one step from the discovery of his life? What do you think happened to Percy Fawcett?
What do you think about this? On January 20, 1996, three young women in Varginha, Brazil, saw a four foot creature with oily skin and red eyes crouched by a wall. The army was in town that morning. A policeman said to have handled it died a month later. Cover story, or Brazil’s Roswell?
What do you think about this? In 1800 settlers at Conneaut, Ohio, opened a four acre burial ground in rows and reported skeletons over seven feet, jaws that fit over a man’s face, double rows of teeth. The graves were plowed under within a generation. Tall tale, or a people buried twice?
What do you think about this? The Iron Pillar of Delhi is six tons of forged iron from around 400 AD. It has stood outside through 1,600 years of monsoons and never rusted, thanks to a protective film from phosphorus rich iron nobody made again. Lucky recipe, or knowledge lost on purpose?
What do you think about this? North Sea trawlers pull up mammoth teeth, flint tools and a carved harpoon from 120 feet deep. Until 8,000 years ago that seabed was Doggerland, a forested land the size of Britain, drowned by rising seas and a tsunami. The lost land of every old story?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a Florida family found a polished 22 pound steel ball in burned brush. It hummed when a guitar played, rolled across rooms on its own and changed direction. Navy X rays showed objects inside, origin unknown. Valve ball, or something that landed?
What do you think about this? The Whaley House in San Diego was built in 1857 where a man was slowly hanged five years earlier. A baby and a daughter later died inside. Visitors report footsteps in empty rooms and a pressure on the throat where the gallows stood. Old house, or long memory?
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