Nel 1963 un uomo buttò giù un muro della cantina e aprì una città nascosta, scavata per 85 m nella roccia vulcanica e capace di ospitare 20.000 persone. Sessant'anni dopo gli archeologi ancora non sanno dire chi abbia scavato le prime gallerie.

Nel 1994 un archeologo tedesco salì su un basso rilievo del sud-est della Turchia che tutti gli altri avevano liquidato come cimitero medievale. Sotto i suoi piedi c'erano cerchi di pietra scolpita eretti da cacciatori raccoglitori undicimilacinquecento anni fa, e nessuno riesce ancora a mettersi d'accordo su cosa servissero.

A diver hunting hammerhead sharks off Japan's westernmost island found a wall of rock with right angles and steps. Forty years later, two credentialled geologists still cannot agree whether anyone built it.

Brickyard workers in Sichuan hit a pit full of giant bronze faces, elephant tusks and gold. Every object had been deliberately broken and burned first, and the people who made them never wrote a single word.

A crater in the Turkmen desert has been burning for around fifty years, and millions of people know exactly how it started. The problem is that the story does not appear in a single document, and the geologists who worked there tell it differently.

For generations the villagers of Shiyan Beicun believed their ponds were bottomless. In 1992 four of them bought pumps to find out, and drained the water off the roof of a hand-carved hall the size of a church. Twenty-four of them have now been opened, and not one line of Chinese history mentions that they exist.

Across the highlands of northern Laos stand thousands of carved stone jars, some weighing fourteen tonnes. A French archaeologist called them tombs in the 1930s. Then the bombs fell, and it took eighty years to get back to the question.

In July 1970 a US test missile carrying radioactive cobalt came down four hundred miles inside Mexico, and the American army built a railhead, a road and a camp to take it home. What stayed behind in the Chihuahuan Desert was a story about radios that will not work. Here is the documented record, and exactly where it runs out.

Ninety-two artificial islands sit in a lagoon off Pohnpei, walled with basalt logs that weigh up to fifty tonnes each. Dating puts the first courses at around 1180 CE. Nobody has yet explained how the stone crossed the island and floated onto the reef.

A 250 hectare wood on the edge of Cluj-Napoca is routinely called the most haunted forest on Earth. Behind the label sit four photographic negatives from August 1968, a circular clearing where trees will not grow, and decades of measurements that were never published. Here is what can actually be documented, and what cannot.

A magazine writer drew a triangle on the Atlantic in 1964. It took one librarian and two insurance ledgers to erase it.

For over a century, glowing orbs have danced across a Texas desert basin. Physicists traced most of them to a highway. Most — not all.