What do you think about this?
In September 1857, the SS Central America, a side wheel steamer packed with California gold rush fortune, sailed straight into a hurricane off the Carolina coast. Five hundred and seventy eight people were aboard. Only one hundred and fifty three came home. The rest went down with the ship, and with them, tons of gold. She carried around eleven tons of it in her hold, not counting whatever passengers had sewn into their coats. The loss was so enormous it helped trigger a national financial panic.
For one hundred and thirty one years she sat more than a mile and a half down in the dark, untouched. Then in 1988 an engineer named Tommy Thompson found her with a homemade underwater robot and began bringing up gold bars and coins by the ton, some worth a small fortune each.
Here is where it turns strange. Thompson sold the treasure, then vanished, with investors and crew saying they were never paid. He was eventually caught and jailed for refusing to reveal where five hundred missing gold coins had gone.
What if there is still a fortune unaccounted for, on the sea floor or hidden somewhere on land?
A cursed ship, the find of a lifetime, or a treasure that was never fully recovered? What do you think really happened to the gold of the Central America?
What do you think about this? In 1891, a poor French priest named Bérenger Saunière began tearing up his church floor, then spent the next two decades funding lavish buildings on a stipend that should not have covered it. Real treasure, or a secret about how he ran his church?
What do you think about this? The Georgia Guidestones were commissioned anonymously in 1979 by a man calling himself R.C. Christian, and no one ever learned his real name before the monument was bombed on July 6, 2022. Message, or a monument that did not deserve to stand?
What do you think about this? Pacifica’s Devil’s Slide has swallowed sections of Highway 1 since 1937, and a WWII watch bunker still perched on its cliff edge has sat abandoned there since 1949. Geology, or a stretch of coast that keeps trying to shrug people off?
What do you think about this? On November 24, 1971, a hijacker calling himself Dan Cooper parachuted from a Boeing 727 with 200,000 dollars and vanished. In 1980, a boy found 5,800 dollars of that exact cash along the Columbia River. Survived, or never told a soul?
What do you think about this? On September 12, 2023, researcher Jaime Maussan presented two small, elongated bodies to Mexico’s Congress, calling them non-human. Scientists who studied similar specimens found them manufactured. Hoax, or evidence a government put on the record?
What do you think about this? At age two, James Leininger began describing a WWII plane crash in detail, and researchers later matched his account to pilot James Huston Jr, killed near Iwo Jima in 1945. Coincidence, or memory that should not exist?
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