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? On the coast of Brittany stand more than three thousand stones in rows that run for miles, raised before Stonehenge and before the pyramids. Nobody left an explanation. A lost astronomy, a forgotten faith, or something we have no word for?
What do you think about this? In 1963 a man in Turkey knocked out a basement wall and found a city cut eighteen levels down, with stone doors that sealed from the inside and room for twenty thousand people. Nobody is certain who dug it. What were they hiding from?
What do you think about this? In 1934 the LA Times ran a front page story about a labyrinth under downtown built by an ancient Lizard People. The city let a mining engineer sink a shaft 250 feet down. Then the money ran out. A fantasy, or a real anomaly under the city?
What do you think about this? In Cholula, Mexico there is a hill with a pretty yellow church on top. It is the largest pyramid ever built, bigger by volume than Giza, swallowed by grass until it looked like ordinary ground. Lost knowledge, deliberate burial, or just time?
What do you think about this? A short boat ride from Venice sits Poveglia, an island so tied to plague dead and a shuttered asylum that it has been closed to visitors for decades. Fishermen steer around it. Grim history and imagination, or ground that holds onto something?
What do you think about this? In October 1967 villagers in Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia watched an object with four lights drop into the water. The Navy sent divers for days and found only yellow foam. Canada’s own files still list it as unidentified. A meteor, or something else?
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