For seven centuries people have found translucent blobs on the grass after shooting stars and blamed the heavens. The lab results are stranger and more mundane at once.

A desperate distress call, a crew found frozen in terror, a ship that exploded before it could be towed — and not a single registry on Earth that says the vessel ever existed.

Behind a small waterfall in New York State, a flame has flickered for generations. When geologists finally tested the rock beneath it in 2013, the textbook explanation fell apart.

Once or twice a year the streets of Yoro fill with living fish after a downpour. A miracle, a waterspout, or something stranger climbing up from below?

Five times it swept through England, striking down the young and the strong before the day was out. Then, after 1551, it disappeared for good, and no one has ever proven what it was.

For decades these polished quartz heads were sold to museums and mystics as relics of a lost world. Then a microscope found the one thing no ancient carver could have left behind.

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 was a list of dozens of treasure caches — and seventy years of searching have produced nothing.

For decades, boulders crossed a dry lakebed on their own, leaving long trails and no witnesses. The answer, when it finally came, was thinner than a windowpane.

Laboratories can now name the exact woods and the distant Scottish basin the stones came from. Why they were dragged across Britain — and how — remains open.