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 the toolmarks no ancient carver could have left — and an auction receipt finished the story the legend never told.

An Ottoman admiral's torn map, found in a palace in 1929, became famous for supposedly showing Antarctica before the ice. The real story is less alien — and far more interesting.

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.