Nel 1898 un contadino svedese del Minnesota estrasse una pietra dalle radici di un albero. Diceva che esploratori nordici avevano raggiunto il cuore dell'America nel 1362. Gli esperti la dichiararono falsa in pochi mesi. Nessuno ha mai dimostrato chi l'abbia incisa.

Un uomo che si faceva chiamare R. C. Christian entrò nel 1979 in una ditta di graniti in Georgia, ordinò un monumento da 108 tonnellate in otto lingue e sparì. Nel 2022 qualcuno lo fece saltare. Nessuno dei due è stato identificato.

German troops stripped it from a Russian palace in thirty-six hours and shipped it west. Eighty years later, six tonnes of carved amber remain missing, and nobody can even agree whether it still exists.

In sixteen days in 1998, someone cut a figure the size of a city into a South Australian plateau, then sent anonymous faxes about it. Nearly thirty years and a cash reward later, no one has claimed the work.

A hotel maid found the greatest electrical inventor of the age dead and penniless in a small Manhattan room. Within two days federal agents had hauled his papers away in trucks. What they took, what they returned, and what never reached Belgrade is still argued about today.

In the 1930s, bulldozers clearing jungle for banana plantations in southern Costa Rica began turning up giant stone balls, some taller than a person and weighing as much as a loaded truck. Workers dynamited many of them looking for gold inside. Nearly a century later, nobody can say for certain how they were carved so precisely, or what they were for.

More than a hundred hollow bronze dodecahedra have been dug up across the northern Roman provinces, each pierced by holes of different sizes. Not one Roman text, inscription or image mentions them. In 2023 a field in Lincolnshire produced the finest example yet, and the mystery only deepened.

A diver surfaced screaming about a heap of corpses on the seabed; they were bronze statues - and beside them lay a 2,000-year-old geared computer. New research keeps making it stranger: it tracked the lunar year with uncanny precision, yet its gears may have jammed when cranked.

A fourteen-foot linen bears the ghostly image of a crucified man. Radiocarbon dating says the Middle Ages; a newer X-ray method says two thousand years. The science is still fighting.

Replicas of the little clay jar really do make electricity — half a volt, sometimes two. The harder question, unanswered for almost ninety years: what was it for?

For decades these polished quartz heads were sold to museums and mystics as relics of a lost world. Then a microscope found toolmarks no ancient carver could have left, and an auction receipt finished the story the legend never told.

In 1952 archaeologists pulled two rolls of corroded copper from a cave at Qumran. Inside: a ledger of dozens of treasure caches, and a final line pointing to a second scroll that explains everything. Neither treasure nor scroll has ever been found.