What do you think about this?
Off the coast of Pohnpei, a small island in the western Pacific, lies a ruined city that should not be possible. It is called Nan Madol, and it is built out over the water, more than a hundred artificial islets laced together by canals, which is why some call it the Venice of the Pacific. But it is what the islets are made of that stops people cold.
The whole city is constructed from massive columns of black basalt, long rod like stones that formed naturally in a volcano, some of them weighing several tons. They are stacked like giant logs to build walls over twenty feet high. In total, the site holds close to a million tons of stone. It was the capital of the Saudeleur dynasty, built up over centuries beginning around eight or nine hundred years ago.
Here is the puzzle. There are no quarries at the building site. The basalt came from elsewhere on the island, and somehow those enormous columns were moved across land and water and lifted into place, by a people with no metal tools, no pulleys, and no written record of how they did it. Local legend simply says two sorcerers made the stones fly through the air.
Makes you wonder how a society we tend to picture as small and simple moved a mountain of stone into the sea and built a city on it.
Lost engineering we have underestimated, or a mystery the islanders themselves could only explain with magic? What do you think raised Nan Madol?
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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